In “Diego and I” he represents himself, as in the rest of his self-portraits, with symbols that allude to both a wounded body and a firm spirit.
In the painting she has the loose hair of a lion and a strong, serene face, although three tears are falling from her eyes. On her forehead appears the face of her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, and in the center of Rivera’s head, a third eye.
There is a reason why Diego and I became the most expensive Latin American painting ever auctioned at almost 35 million dollars.
Seven decades after her death, Kahlo still connects and moves. She leaves spectators speechless in museums. She maintains the interest of fans who carry her image on bags, T-shirts and hats. She inspires the selfies that tourists take in Mexico City, when they visit her beautiful home. Blue house.
Frida worked on the power of the individual, says researcher and art curator Ximena Jordán. She is not creating a cult of the ego because she does not portray herself as she was, but rather she creates herself, she re-creates herself.
His work conveys that every individual is vast, complex and powerful. He breaks the distance that his contemporaries maintained with their viewers by creating pieces that explored, above all, progress, the machine and power games.
Kahlo, on the other hand, feels close to her. In works such as The Wounded Deer, which alludes to the imagery of the martyr in Catholicism, she portrays the spiritual dimension of her life and captures what can be touched, felt, suffered.
“I connect with her heart and her writings,” says Cris Melo, a 58-year-old American artist who lives in California and has inspired part of her work from Kahlo. “We have the same language of love and a similar history of heartbreak.”
Melo, unlike Kahlo, did not suffer a bus accident that punctured her pelvis and left her with a life of surgeries, abortions and the amputation of a leg. But she does know physical pain and in the midst of that suffering, those years of feeling that her resilience was slipping away, she said to herself: If Frida could handle this, so can I.
Frida’s self-portraits are a reminder that we all have many ways to exercise and realize the power that life gave us. Or God, so to speak, adds Jordan.
Like others who shared a Marxist ideology, Kahlo believed that the Catholic Church was castrating, inquisitorial and racist. She disdained it, as did every artist born in a modernist and post-revolutionary context, but at the same time she understood that there is a spiritual dimension in devotion to Catholicism that benefits humans.
In her work and the home she shared with Rivera, religious images and symbols abound.
The Casa Azul, for example, preserves its collection of 473 votive offerings, small paintings that some Catholics offered as thanks for miracles or gifts received. It is not known exactly when the artist began collecting them, but it is estimated that it was from the 1930s and that many were gifts.
The fact that Kahlo kept these objects could be due, according to Jordan, to the artist’s understanding of her life after the accident. Why, if not by some kind of miracle, would she have survived the brutal collision between a tram and a bus?
The only difference is that, due to her contextual situation, she does not attribute this miracle to a deity of Catholic origin, but to the generosity of life, says the expert.
Despite the physical and emotional pain that Kahlo captures in her oil paintings, there is no bitterness, sadness or defeatism among those who admire her work.
The followers of Instagram accounts Those who reproduce her paintings emulate her strength, her impetus. They create prints with the serene face of the woman who turned her broken spine, her abortions and her husband’s infidelities into art.
Frida inspires many people to be persistent in something, says Amni, a Spanish artist based in London who reinterprets Kahlo’s image with artificial intelligence.
Other artists have inspired me, but Frida has been the most special because of everything she went through, she adds. Despite the suffering she had, the love, the heartbreak and the accident, she always stood firm.
For him, as for Melo, Kahlo’s most memorable works are those in which Rivera appears on her forehead, like a third eye: Diego in my thoughts, currently in the North Carolina Museum of Art, in the United States, and Diego and I, which can be visited at the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Frida, probably because of her accident, although she is a modern artist, works from a postmodern perspective and that is why viewers feel more identified with her in the 21st century, says Jordan. Because it involves respect, attention and consideration for the beliefs of others.
Because of the tears falling from her face in Diego and I, the painting is often interpreted as a representation of the suffering Rivera caused her, but the inclusion of the third eye, which represents the unconscious in Hinduism and enlightenment in Buddhism, refers to something more.
The religious nature of the work is not in the fact that Frida has Diego in her thoughts because that is not religious, says Jordan. But the fact that she has him as a third eye, and that Diego in turn has a third eye, shows that her affection made her transcend to another dimension of existence.
In other words, Kahlo establishes how, through love, individuals connect with their spiritual dimension.
Throughout his work, even though it unleashes suffering, pain is a vital impulse. Tears stream down his cheeks, yes, but as Jordan explains, they denote something more.
They show that she is alive, they represent the activity of the heart.
Perhaps that is why her last painting hardly expresses that Kahlo was about to die.
On a table with watermelons under a semi-cloudy sky, the broken body of one of the fruits says: Life, life. ____
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FUENTE: AP