The Days of War

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The Days of War, is a series that I painted when I lived in New York in 1991. During that year, I made a large group of paintings in an expressionist-figurative style with colors that express that chapter in our contemporary history this is a series that scrutinized the devastating Gulf War of 1991: “Desert Storm”.

 

Mario Arbelaez, a Colombian Art critic, says of this series of Gamarra: “…Her loneliness declares itself like a mirror; it is an echo of tumultuous solitude that participates with pain and perplexment in the human drama that appears silently in her painting, where happiness, like a rattle still hidden in some indistinguishable point, is produced by the force of the strokes of her brushes and her magic load of colors…”

 

I remember how every day and every hour, most American television channels broadcasted "Desert Storm" live.  As if this devastating war was an extraordinary action, suspense and horror movie.

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The journalists were endlessly narrating the images of each event, of each new bomber plane and its silent new technology, of each tragic burst that would annihilate life. They narrated each movement of troops, each group of prisoners of war, and a destruction of cities and towns. They narrated the movement of every exodus of people running terrified through the deserts that were charred with each burning oil well. Cold stories about those disfigured faces of pain and fear, of every wounded person who was bleeding mutilated, of every persecution without mercy or forgiveness. They narrated the unending day-by-day and the long and sad counting of the number of dead.

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While the war lasted, all I could do during those months was painting the deep restlessness and the feeling of impotence in the face of so much senselessness that had settled in my soul. The war was a deafening scream, a wound of colors that bled without blood, which I could only close and heal if I went deep within myself and returned to the divine ritual of painting.

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Mari Gamarra