Beatriz González

Anyone who happened to have heard the story behind the series “Los suicidas del Sisga” (The Sisga Suicides), 1965, would have been intrigued: Two young religious fanatics in love drowned themselves in the Sisga Dam to keep from falling into sins of the flesh. It’s telling that, ignoring the event, what struck Beatriz González was the clumsiness of newspapers’ reproduction of the couple’s image—the excessive and grainy flatness of their smiling faces, the overall lack of detail.

This curiosity toward mass-produced images—their aesthetics, their political and affective clout—unites the strategies

picks April 19, 2018

Vítor Mejuto

For centuries, the education of painters revolved around scrutinizing masterpieces in order to grasp how their makers resolved problems of a purely technical nature. No one looks at painting as mercilessly, and with as little sense of metaphor, as a painter. In “Pintor en la corte,” (Painter in the Court), Vítor Mejuto revisits Diego Velázquez, Antonello da Messina, Jaime Serra, Francisco Goya, and Titian, among others. Mejuto’s small-format paintings are concise and honed, to say nothing of elegant, reproductions of the geometric aspects of some of those masters’ works.

Despite its schematic