It´s a summer afternoon with a sea view. Children play everywhere in beautiful gardens surrounding beach houses and white sand. The sound of the waves blends with the voices of the women that chat about their kids, without taking their eyes away from them. They are all gathered together in one of the houses celebrating a birthday party, hence all the noise. When the portrait is taken these women are no longer there. They disappear and become one with the walls of the house, also white. They are replaced by the children´s mothers that pose happily with their children.
These women, so important in the lives of those children, are forgotten and excluded from the family memory. They feed, raise, and care for our children, but don´t share our table. And in an attempt to make them disappear we dress them in uniforms, as if by dressing them in white we can make them invisible and hide their “choledad” (race).
This contradiction is the beginning of Adriana Tomatis´ reflection about this latent reality: the exclusion and racism among Peruvians. She proyects a critical view of the Lima upper class, being herself no stranger to it, and observes what goes around her, covering with fog images of every day life in Lima.
A group of construction workers rest in the gardens of a seafront residential district and disappear, melting into the gray sky, so their appearance won´t affect the lovely view of the sea. In another residential district a group of people jogging turn their backs on us. Here the landscape is also gray and they disappear leaving behind reality, a reality that bothers them. Adriana also points herself in a family scene as a symbolic representation of our society.
Happy Days shows us the every day reality that we let pass because it bothers us and stains the landscape. She pictorially blurs the pictures dematerializing the images, symbolizing the need to make disappear the other like an inevitable thanatotic pulse. The white paint is employ beyond its chromatic possibilities as a racial concept and as a model of aspiration in our society.
This group of pictures enters our perception as a Trojan horse: beautiful and harmonious, painted in a vigorous high key, only for us later discover in its interior the demons of our collective unconsciousness.
Finally our happy days are darkened by a group of vultures that watch us from above, waiting for us to hurt each other so they can feed on our wounds. We hurt and get hurt as Jorge Bruce emphasizes so truly “siempre se es blanco o cholo de alguien” (one is always someones´s white man or dark man). *
Claudia Coca
*Nos habiamos choleado tanto. Jorge Bruce. Lima, 2007
The art of impressionism developed in Europe during the second half of the 19th Century in an attempt to materialize the instantaneity of the effects of light on surfaces and objects. The concept “impression” had its origin in photography and was applied to painting as long as it moulded the images constituted by the light. This capturing of an image au naturel resulted in a dynamic optic of decomposition and recomposition of the image: the chromatic areas of the picture decomposed the definition of the objects and the spectator observing at a distance would reconstruct the image in his retina.
It is also during the second half of the 19th century, in the newly formed Peruvian Republic, when a creole bourgeois class comes into power, a class that embraces European immigration so as to “improve the race”. This social group configurated a complex idiosyncrasy which found legitimacy for its social, economic and political predominance in the recycling of the colonial values of the ethnic caste system. Lima was the center of this order, perpetuated by the mist that covered with white the skin color of its inhabitants. In the Peru of today, prestige and social distinction are still defined by the color of the skin, the family name, or foreign origin: a situation that clearly reveals the remains of a colonial order entering well into the 21st century. The dominant caste white, creole and bourgeois extends its dominions to public spaces which are privatized into exclusive urban areas, beach resorts and amusement parks, all which reserve the right to admission.
In the series of paintings “Happy Days” Adriana Tomatis brings together a group of impressions of this idiosyncrasy and this post colonial society of castes and servants.At a first encounter, the artist identifies typical scenes in the daily lives of the upper classes of Lima and captures them photographically. Following a procedure of clear impressionistic reference, Tomatis digitally places the objects out of focus, decomposing the images into chromatic areas in which the color white distorts the silhouettes within a misty spectre, similar to the skies of Lima in their particular haze. The last step consists in transferring these dematerialized impressions onto canvas and thus returning their material state.
We arrive to observe the paintings of Tomatis, and at first glance we are warmed by an atmosphere of light and apparent comfort, but if we stand back and reconfigure the images registered, we discover the social character of her impression. The series constitutes a brief genealogy of servant relations and hierarchical inclusión of the upper classes of Lima. In the midst of a collective paranoia for security, they delegate the chores of care and protection of the “weak, unprotected” to the subordinate members which they incorporate into their intimate spaces; that is, nannies, maids, domestic employees, guardians. Here, the selection of situations in the paintings of Tomatis is elocuent: blond children taken by the hand by their substitute mothers, nannies dressed in impeccable white at all occasions. On the other side, an undifferentiated group of runners breathing the humid density of the air at a seaside road or at some Lima residential neighborhood. Paradoxically, we see a group of workers resting placidly in a relaxed attitude, constructors of a future with a view for others. This scene reminds us of Manet´s bucolic painting “Luncheon on the Grass” (1863).
The atmosphere of Lima defined by its gray sky and mistiness on the seashore invades and distorts the different social situations described in her landscape. The artist composes scenes in which the repose of a group of carrion vultures coincides with the white uniforms of the domestic servants. The whitish gray absorbs the inhabitants of the city in its melancholy, dense and immutable. However, in the midst of this apparent melancholy of hazy instants, “Happy Days” bestows an ironic and irreverent smile at the absurd persistence of colonial behavior in the present day Lima society. And it is here that we perceive the incisive “a go-go” melody sung by Rita Pavone “Che me importa del mondo”. What do I care about the World. What do I care.
Miguel Zegarra
Lima, on a gray winter day