Laconically titled “Paintings”, this exhibition by Cristina Garrido comprises a series of hand-colored prints of famous photographs documenting Conceptual art performances. Sticking to the original size of her sources, Garrido draws on her training as an academic painter to inject the compositions with color, creating to a newly vivified gallery of uncommitted iconoclasts––artists who, while aiming to divert the focus from the art object, reified a single image that was later swallowed, once again, by art history and the art market.
As a strategy, the introduction of a wider palette performs a different type of reenactment, veering away from the exhausted trope of physical remakes. For example, in [Colored] Carole Schneeman, Interior Scroll (all works cited, 2022), Garrido revisits an image in which a naked Schneemann––who, like Garrido, continued to consider herself a painter throughout her career—sports a ruffled flower-patterned apron; her knees are bent forward, and she seems to be reciting from a sort of libretto she holds with one hand. The artist’s striking presence in the original prints is now made theatrical and exaggerated; the apparent objectivity of the matter-of-fact black-and-white documentation is called into question.
The hilarious video Paragraphs on Make-Up Art juxtaposes colorful extracts from YouTube makeup tutorials with subtitles taken from Sol Lewitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” that stress the importance of ridding art of caprice and other whimsies. Was black-and-white imagery the actual device for doing so, or is it merely the facade behind which lurk untold hues?
— Fabiola Iza