In a work of art you can always distinguish two different times that constitute it and that make it possible to approach it.
On the one hand, it is evident that, as has been repeated many times, the work of art is a child of its time: every work is linked to a historical, social and artistic context without which its appearance could not be understood, either as continuity , as a relationship or as a breakup. Thus, the work is never born from nothing, but rather, unfailingly, occupies a precise place within a cultural process whose roots and branches extend far beyond the intentions of its author. It is the time of creation by the artist.
On the other hand, although a long time has passed since it was created, the work that is preserved exists in our own present. It is the time, today, of our experience of that reality created in the past, which continues to enrich or question us. But between the time of creation and the time of experience there is always a tension that is the obvious result of the ways of thinking, of the interests and possibilities that separate the past and the present. They are differences that, in some way, embody the essence of culture and history and allow a multiple approach to the work.
Manuel in Krisisfrom 1985, by Flor María Bouhot (Bello, Antioquia, 1949) stands out for its novel relevance. Seen in the present, this painting has the effectiveness of introducing us to its own space. In effect, his point of view places us at that same table and makes us participants in what is happening. The reds and yellows jump out at us, as do the glasses and bottles defined by a strong contour that makes the whole even flatter. Also the details in the background seem to close the space instead of creating depth. The flat and violently contrasting colors seem to respond to the presence of artificial lights that distort everything we see. The composition is motley, like a kind of network that prevents us from establishing distances and that, ultimately, forces us to understand that we are part of this story.
But, perhaps, when we insist too much on the experience of the present, convinced of the significant power that it embodies and that is still valid, we overlook the impact that a work like this produced, in fact, at the time of its appearance, almost 40 years ago. years; an impact that, of course, has to do with our cultural history and that also needs to be taken into account.
After decades of predominance of an art linked to formal academic traditions and nationalist ideas, starting in the 70s of the last century, a harsh and stark realism made its way. Artists like Óscar Jaramillo and Saturnino Ramírez explored the underbelly of society into which Débora Arango had already entered, rejected and isolated for many years. Also since the late 70s, Flor María Bouhot, armed with her camera and her freedom, embarked on her own “chair of observation,” as she defines it, to develop a first major series titled “Symphony of Guayaquil,” to which which one belongs Manuel in Krisis.
The artist searches in the Guayaquil neighborhood for the smells, colors, vital rhythms and contrasts that she had experienced in her adolescence in Puerto Berrío where she worked in her father’s warehouse. But what he finds is, perhaps, deeper and more significant. In 1863, the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire had spoken of the “beauty of the horrible” to refer to the immersion of some of the artists of his time in the hidden world of bars, tenements, prostitution and the degradation of new slavery that filled the great metropolises, not with a moralistic sense but with social and political criticism.
Of course, Flor María Bouhot is not an isolated phenomenon. But his work has a greater impact than other artists of his generation. She is a woman who, in total freedom, deeply scrutinizes the city of the moment and, through the analysis and presentation of the underworld of society, reveals the individual and collective unconscious that had always been hidden.
A woman who is not limited to creating a scenario and who is not interested in giving us moral lessons, but rather, with the stridency of her themes, shapes and colors that capture the interest of the observer, she throws in our faces the “beauty of the horrible”, the image of what we are deep down and had not recognized.