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Management is pleased to present Beatriz Zamora: The Lost Works, an exhibition of works from the late 1970s, by the 91-year-old Mexican artist Beatriz Zamora. In 1980, Zamora left Mexico due to a series of violent reactions to her exhibitions, and brought many works with her from her studio in Mexico City to New York, where she stayed until 1987. In 1988, Zamora was ultimately denied re-entry into the US, and all of the works she had brought to and made in New York were considered lost for nearly 40 years. The paintings were recently recovered and are exhibited here for the first time. This marks Zamora’s first solo exhibition in New York in over 50 years. A text by French art historian Guillaume Blanc-Marianne accompanies the exhibition.
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Here are ten paintings that for a long time made themselves known only as rumors. A rumor of their own existence, since they were presumed lost; the rumor of a murmur, the world’s, which reaches us only muffled (as it reaches the child growing in its mother’s womb); a rumor like the rumble of volcanoes about to roar; a rumor that carries certain anecdotes about their rare and singular author, whose life has been made of ruptures and upheavals. Beatriz Zamora painted them between 1977 and 1979, in the first years of her definitive turn to Black.
Their excavation brings us back to a threshold in her story, which she started writing with color, in a surrealist vein. In 1977, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, she presented La Tierra (The Earth), a group of heavy works made of crushed marble, stubble, and grain. Earth is not a motif there but the source. Black already dominates, set against ochre, thereby echoing the opposition drawn by ancient Egypt: Kemet, the black of the silt, against Deshret, the red land of the desert. The following year, the painting prize of the Salón Nacional de Artes Plásticas, that arbiter of artistic taste, was awarded to her for a work from the El Negro series. From then on she would remain faithful to her project, never betraying the idea that drives her: that Black is inexhaustible and has nothing to do with reduction.
The history of the black monochrome is dominated by a logic of subtraction, whether one thinks of Malevich’s zero of form, Reinhardt’s last paintings, or Soulages’s explorations of light—a history that is, moreover, essentially Western and male. Zamora’s Black stands against it: it is an “absolute,” the “symbol of symbols,” and it “includes all colors, forms, and contents.”[1] Chinese painters held that ink, well handled, could contain the five colors[2]. Zamora made this conviction her own, except that she arrived at it through matter rather than the brush.
Black, in truth, imposed itself on her before painting ever did. As a child, she learned from her nanny, whom she had asked, that we die when we stop breathing. She then set out to try her hand at death: night after night, seated on a stone in the garden, she practiced apnea, until a near-death experience gave her what she still describes as a knowledge of the universe, an encounter with it. This is how Black came to her: at the edge of death, in its company—not as a confrontation with mourning, but as a revelation. Hence her intuition: no word can contain Black. She would never try to define it or pin it down, only to transmit it.
Earth is the medium, to be sure, but so is the artist—in the sense that she acts as a vehicle of transmission, faced with the need to produce “exogenous images,” external to the body, in order to render its “endogenous images,”[3] in keeping with a tradition rooted in the “symbolic exchange” between death and the image[4]. Therefore, Zamora’s Black is not a matter of style, but a cosmology including humans. We are black inside, she asserts, and the branching of our neurons mirrors the nervous structure of the cosmos. The paintings that follow from this “describe for us the origin of the Universe and of the Earth, but with us inside,”[5] as one could read of La Tierra in 1977—with all the violence that implies, witness a certain “crevice that aches from its own fissure.”[6] This Black also issues from the mother (cosmic though she may be), for Earth is “the womb and the tomb,”[7] as Zamora puts it. As an epigraph to La Tierra, she had chosen a maxim from Laozi: “Whoever knows white but holds to black possesses the measure of the world.”[8] And so we find her surveying the world to harvest the materials her paintings are made of, and thereby take its measure. The spirituality that guides her proceeds from no doctrine but from nature itself: the copal she burns and the volcanic earth she uses, the Mexican altar of the Day of the Dead, the Taoist maxim, the vocabulary and vast numbers of astrophysics—all coexist there without hierarchy. Ecology is not a cause, but a cosmology: a worldview rooted in Nature, which reveals the “eloquent pulsar of fossil light that the gaze reactivates.”[9] What she shapes is not a color but the very form of Black. She is indeed a medium in every sense of the word—less the author of Black than the place it passes through. Her paintings, she says, speak for themselves; it falls on us to learn their language.
Such a stance would bring her many hardships. In Mexico, the woman who kept her distance from politics as much as from the market ran up against an openly hostile art establishment. The Black she has practiced for five decades is the proof of her patience, she says, but also of her tenacity, for she left everything behind to devote herself to it wholly and exclusively from the mid-1970s on. The ten paintings, survivors of so long an obscurity, bear witness to this in turn: now comes the day of their delivery.
— Guillaume Blanc-Marianne
1 Beatriz Zamora, quoted in Adriana Moncada, [untitled article on the exhibition Lo negro del silencio en el cosmos, Academia de San Carlos, Mexico City], undated press clipping, artist’s archive. Translation by Guillaume Blanc-Marianne (GBM).
2 Zhang Yanyuan, Lidai minghua ji [Record of famous painters of successive dynasties], ca. 847: “When ink is wielded, the five colors are all present” (運墨而五色具). Translation by GBM.
3 Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 15. Translation by GBM.
4 Ibid., 4, 87. Belting here quotes Jean Baudrillard’s notion of “symbolic exchange”.
5 Alberto Dallal, “Beatriz Zamora: el sentido del universo,” Revista Mexicana de Cultura (Sunday supplement of El Nacional), no. 425, March 27, 1977; reprinted in La Tierra: Obras de Beatriz Zamora, exh. cat. (Mexico City: INBA, 1977). Translation by GBM.
6 “Pintura terrible, gran arte,” unsigned article, press clipping, [1977]. Translation by GBM.
7 “Pintar la Tierra, vital necesidad de Beatriz Z.,” unsigned article, press clipping, Mexico City, 1977. Translation by GBM.
8 Quoted in Alaíde Foppa, “Los gestos de la Tierra,” press clipping, May 8, 1977. Translation by GBM.
9 Pedro Schneider, “Beatriz Zamora. La magia de la luz fósil,” letter of recommendation to the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Mexico City, February 2002. Translation by GBM.