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Calendar Art    Sunday, December 4, 1977    The Washington Star  H-20

Artists, and the Pain of Chile: A Panoply of Mordant Shocking Images 
[[handwritten]] December 4, 77  The Washington Star [[end HW]] 
By Benjamin Forgey

[[centerpiece, drawing]] "Los Monstruos del Sur," by Chilean artist Edwardo Leon.

     The connection between art and politics has been a strong, if not always predominant, theme in the Latin American art of this century. At times, such as the famous episode of the Mexican muralists, artists have found themselves allied directly with political power and a governing apparatus. Usually, however, artists have been outsiders and the political content of their art a protest against the status quo and/or a vision of another, better reality.
      For obvious reasons, most of the images in an exhibition, "Latin America: The Other Image," currently on view at the Fondo del Sol Spanish-American Media Center (2112 R St. NW) fall into the category of protest art. The exhibition is billed as a broad survey of contemporary Latin American art. It is, however, primarily a demonstration of the fresh cultural and political pain of one country: Chile.
      The exhibition was conceived and organized by the Chile Committee for Human Rights. Most of the artists in it are Chilean expatriates, expelled from their native land by the governing military junta after the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973. Their art and their personal histories tell of the profound shock of recent experience.
      Rene Castro, the Chilean artist who selected the show from ratists now living in the United States, Canada and Europe, is perhaps typical. Castro, though not politically active in the conventional sense, says he was an open supporter of the Allende government in his art classes at the Catholic University and the University of Chile in Santiago. He was arrested shortly after the coup and spent nearly two years in a notorious prison camp in the Atacama desert. Like many of the artists in this show, he was released on pain of exile.

THIS KIND OF tangible biographical experience explains the agonizing urgency that prevails in the exhibition, which is not a pleasant one at which to look. Drawing upon two traditions that have long exercised a hold over the Chilean imagination - the tradition of the surrealists, exemplified here in the vigorous mural-sized drawing by Roberto Sebastien Matta, who supplies a direct link to European Surrealism of the 1930s, and a linear, graphic expressionism that can be traced back to Goya - these artists present us with a panoply of mordant, shocking images.
      There has always been something particularly elegant in South American draftsmanship. In the present context, such elegance does indeed come as an icy shock, when it is applied to dramas of frightening, painful ambiguity by a master such as Mario Toral, or as witness to scenes of appalling torture in the pen-and-ink drawings of Myriam Holgado. A similar kind of elegance inhabits, with similar effect, the sculpture of Guido Rocha.
      But if these and other images in the show can be read as reactions to a specific situation, they also exist on another, more generic level. Castro's paintings are good examples of this. In one, "Captain is Looking for Someone," he depicts a dog regarding the shrouded cadaver of his master. In another, a tiny man, whose physical development seems to have been cruelly thwarted, is spreaded-eagled under a haunting sky populated by a two bulbous red clouds that seem about to burst.
      These paintings are, to be sure, about Chile, and about Rene Castro's personal experience, but they also pose painful questions whose answers transcend the specific social and political terrain. In style and content they are identifiably Latin American, but they raise issues of human existence that are not confined to any single part of the earth.
  SPECIAL NOTEICE should be taken of two artists in the show: Marcelo Montecino, whose brother was killed during the coup, has made a collage of extraordinary photographs taken at the time. What impresses it not what Montecino did with the photographs. To the contrary, they would carry more force as discrete images and I can only urge that at some point they published or exhibited for their inherent documentary value. 
    Juan Downey, in contrast to the other artists in the show, utilizes an entirely different set of means to express his vision - namely, the video tape - and in many ways Downey's art is the more original and more radical manifestation in the exhibit. For the past five years, Downey has traveled among Indian tribes in almost inacessible reaches of Latin America. His quest, part romantic, part political, has produced a body of work that promises to be a major achievement in video art. It would be appropriate for the Fondo del Sol or some like institution to sponsor a comprehensive showing of Downey's tapes.
     It is perhaps unfair to call most of the work in this exhibition "protest art" in that it is not, at least ostensibly, aligned with a specific political program. But it is a show of works by artists who only recently have become exiles, our century's most tangible sort of outsider. As such, the exhibit stands as a tribute to the power of art to convey a feeling of moral outrage. The exhibition continues through Dec. 20. [[Small filled in circle]]