Cecilia Vicuña Sees Venice Through Her Mother’s Eyes

An unforgettable artwork at this year’s Venice Biennale captivates readers very long before they action foot in the Giardini or the Arsenale. Gazing out from Venice’s vaporetti, the iconic community drinking water buses that ferry passengers throughout the greenish lagoon, are the eyes of Cecilia Vicuña’s mother. As visitors disembark at the aquatic city’s buoyant docks versus a soundscape of gurgles and splashes and churning motors, they glimpse on patiently, deep brown wells of gentleness and depth. A 97-calendar year-outdated lady stares again. These are her eyes she traveled to Venice to see them, far more than four many years just after her daughter painted them.

“Bendígame Mamita” (“Bless Me, Mommy”) dates from 1977, when Vicuña was living in Bogotá, and it has considering that then hung in the relative obscurity of her mom Norma Ramírez’s residence. Now it is reproduced all over the Biennale, not just on the vaporetti but on posters and signage, and the work itself is on look at in the Central Pavilion, in which the composition can be appreciated in its entirety. “I suffered extremely significantly when the portray disappeared,” Ramírez admitted in an interview from Venice, remembering the working day when the canvas remaining her house. “But looking at it below, I understand that it could not just be for me. It had to be for everyone.”

The do the job portrays Ramírez suspended in a celestial expanse, her experience bisected by the sinuous curve of a guitar whose round chamber exposes a single eye. She disencumbers herself of her superior-heeled footwear as her locks flow freely. Hovering above, frieze-like vignettes narrate moments from Ramírez’s everyday living up till her eldest daughter’s departure from Chile on the brink of Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, when Vicuña was compelled into exile in London in the painting, the artist drifts away in a rivulet of blood. Decades later, the two have been reunited in Colombia for the 1st time given that they parted means, a scene also memorialized in the piece — in one more vignette, they are standing aspect by aspect, beaming, Vicuña keeping a paintbrush.

“My mother arrived and with her existence and her stop by, I recovered a reality that the coup experienced taken from me: the unstoppable, indestructible happiness of the enjoy between a mother and daughter,” claimed Vicuña. “She came from suffering, loss of life, and horror in Chile, and I from exile and extraordinary poverty, and nevertheless this come upon was these kinds of an absolute joy, a pleasure that radiated.”

In a final episode, illustrated at the leading of the canvas, an 8-12 months-outdated Vicuña poses with her mother’s arm all around her, the two linking hands. It’s based on a photograph Vicuña has always carried with her, of special significance since it depicts them in a symbiotic embrace, “as if we were being a solitary unit.”

“Then, my mom will become a guitar that sings,” Vicuña continued. “But the guitar is a prisoner and even in its sorrow, in that prison of the dictatorship, her body requires the form of a whirlwind of passion and adore, and she kicks off her shoes. And she is dance itself.” In spite of her significant gaze and a drooping flower in her hand, Ramírez — whom Vicuña and her siblings nicknamed la reina del mambo since she “danced like a serpent” — exudes a perception of dynamic movement.

“Bendígame Mamita” is 1 of the number of operates by Vicuña that survived from this time period: A lot more than 50 % of the paintings she made in the 1960s and ’70s, most of which she gifted to good friends and family members, were being dropped or discarded. But two persons held on to them — her mom and her brother Ricardo, equally of whom joined Vicuña in Venice.

The story of the painting’s passage to Italy was also serendipitous. Cecilia Alemani, curator of the Biennale’s 59th version, experienced requested taking part artists to post functions depicting eyes for the exhibition’s graphic id. Vicuña’s was just one of four picked, alongside with parts by Belkis Ayón, Felipe Baeza, and Tatsuo Ikeda. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Life time Accomplishment, the Biennale’s maximum honor, and her survey exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, Cecilia Vicuña: Spin Spin Triangulene, opened a thirty day period later on. It is, alternatively unbelievably, the Chilean artist and poet’s very first solo demonstrate in a New York museum.

A tribute to the credo of motherly really like, “Bendígame Mamita,” fathomed from the soreness of separation and the elation of reunification, is also a cri de cœur in opposition to displacement, just one of war’s silent reverberations. Tens of hundreds ended up tortured, imprisoned, or killed beneath Pinochet’s 17-yr regime plenty of other individuals isolated and exiled.

“That is my portrait,” Vicuña concludes subject-of-factly. “It is a rise up against the dreadful suffering of oppression.”

“It is a amazing portray,” claimed Ramírez. “Made from a marvelous inspiration, made with tenderness and creativity.”

Vicuña pauses. “Gracias, mamita.“