When we say that art can elaborate the present by making it a metaphor that can be read in the future, we are undoubtedly saying something true. When we say that it is difficult for an artist to intervene in the present and in the present in real time, we are saying something halfway true. Picasso made “Guernica” in two months and had it exhibited a few months after the bombing of the city. A Mexican painter active in Texas, Roberto Marquez, is painting his “Guernica” in Irpin, Ukraine. He is painting it on the ruins of the bridge. collapsed under the bombing.
Well, I thought: can “Guernica” be painted in Guernica? Marquez is doing it, he has done it. And those flashes of color that tell the tragedy of the Ukrainians fleeing the war light up the ruins. It is a museum of rubble with no spectators except from afar, through intermediary vision. But no museum room would be more right, and more desperate, for this twenty-first century “Guernica”.