"Art and Testimony" - Vision of the African American Diaspora

By Carole Boyce Davies

The African Diaspora is a complex field of interaction, representing at times in the context of the wide dispersal of African peoples worldwide, a series of overlapping diaspora. What is often significant, in my view, is the salient aspect of transformation and re-elaboration. Candioti's work, in this exhibition, represents just that.

"Art and Testimony" presents wonderful images of African and peoples native of the Americas, in striking aesthetic articulations. It is fitting that she titles it "Art and Testimony", a deliberate link between the representational in visual articulation. We often do not think of "art" in the same discursive frame as "testimony". But here the juxtaposition of these two fields brings its subject matter to life. And, indeed, this art thus testifies to the existence of a people rich in African culture as in its extensions in the New World.

Candioti has received accolades for her work across Latin America. We are pleased to be able to have the opportunity to witness this visual feast in North America now. The extension of knowledge about the African Diaspora, in this case, via art is an essential component of our intellectual and social understandings. It provides us with another opportunity to make decisive links between University and our various communities. Candioti is well positioned to do this having studied well the African Diaspora communities in Latin America. "Art and Testimony" serves as a fitting documentation and representation of these cultures and their diverse peoples.

Carole Boyce Davies Director, African- New World Studies Florida International University 2000

Ana Candioti: Paintings in Context

By Olson Andersen

Portrait has been present throughout the history of art. Since ancient times, they have constituted a genre very closely linked to commissions or requests made by very important personages, like the pharaohs of Egypt, rulers and even the gods.

During the middle ages, religious representations adopted an idealized form, as it is the case of byzantine icons. Also during this period, those who could afford it made donations to the church, in some cases to expiate their sins; the donor thus commonly appears in the representations.

The Italian painter Giotto (c. 1270 - 1337) serves as example of this period. Moreover, the baroque period increased the dynamics of portraits, often used by the bourgeoisie as a status symbol.

The Flemish painter Van Dyck and Rubens became distinguished portrait artists, exercising great influence on French painting where court portraiture was also present. Rembrandt, Zurbaran and Velazquez, for the most part, were court painters.

In the 19th Century, neoclassical paintings also depicted heroic figures. In the 20th Century, however, the new avant-garde movements began to transform figuration: the cubists, the form; and the fauvist, the color.

When pop art appeared on the scene in the fifties with graphic art, it evoked film stars, politicians and other famous characters. During the 1960's, a new trend of figurative painting appeared with the Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon as well as Lucian Freud with a psychological art, even though maintaining a western and euro-centric outlook of the human figure.

The transcendence and historical transgression in portrait genre provoked by Ana Candioti places her as an artist of rupture in the history of world painting.

The painter's view aims at characters embedded in the deep roots of the American and the world; those who have never portrayed, abandoned by the indifference of the colonialist history of western centers of power. This is a pioneering as well as "anti-classic" quality, even if her pictorial technique ironically uses the virtues of great "easel painting" in order to lay bare and decolonize the style and attitude of the artist as anthropologist or postmodernist sociologist. This ethno-visionary conscience will give Ana Candioti the place she deserves in the history of art.

Olson Andersen Art critic Sweden