By Romano Battaglia

In order to discuss the work of Gabriela Bernales it is necessary, first and foremost, to have a better understanding of Per, where she was born and grew up, breathing the air of a world charged with
Power and mystery.

One need only survey the Andes and the unpredictable sky overtopping them in order to understand that the innermost voice of the soul does not only involve the magic of story nights, but also moments of suffering and pain.

Those who know nothing about the shepherds peopling those enormous heights, forever changing above the awe-inspiring summits or the cutting light that imbues the landscape with mystery and magic will be incapable of fully understanding Bernales's art. It is not my intention to add or reveal conspicuous truths, not do I wish to give a distorted view of a story that is almost too obvious, too clear-cut.
Gabriela Bernales paints as if driver by natural impulse that forces her to remove herself from current trends, fashions and compromises. Her progress is like that of the wind, the rain, the sun, the season, the onset of spring or the beginning of a hurricane that devastates forests and uproots huge tree. Her painting often revisits the past, following the passage of Spanish art conditioned by climate and indigenous cultual heritage.
Her research fives the impression that she wishes to unearth the Cuzco cultural heritage where traces of early Renaissance specimens still remain, of that "plateresque" style that marks the pre-Hispanic design still found in some of the buildings which have been partially destroyed by frequent earthquakes. However, the past, like a ghost crossing the vast plains and mountains with its hoard by frequent earthquakes. However, the past, like a ghost crossing the vast plains and mountains with its hoard of memories, always returns to the artist's mind.

Her work is wide-ranging: with their violent colours, some of Bernales's compositions give the impression of wishing to embrace the enormous Peruvian landscape which extends from the coast to the sierra and then on to the Amazonian plains. It is not mere chance that, even as a child, she was strongly influenced by the city of Cuzco ( where she was born) and possibly by the condors circling around the peaks of the mountains depicted in the plates by the Indian painter Diego Quispe, seventeenth century maestro of the Cusco art school.

Having grown up in a natural environment, with an awareness of the problems of the land and its farmers, this child of the Andes still carries that magical world rich in thrills and emotions, pain and memories. A store of memories that is ever-present even in Italy where she chose to live, attending the Brera Academy, meeting other artist and giving exhibitions in various European cities. Although she has received acknowledgements, and advice, she has never lost that interior richness or child-hood spontaneity fascinated, as she was, by the flights, of the condors and the fairy-tales her father told his children about raging bulls who, on moonlit nights, emerged from the dense forests with their mother-of-pearl eyes. The animals of those fantastic nights continue to inhabit her compositions as an expression of anger at land stolen from her parents, the iniquities suffered by the poor, and the pain of the peasant.
Once the world of sufferance seen through the calm, soft eyes of the artist who portrays children whit their terrified eyes standing behind barbed-wire fences, or silent women, terribly alone in their nudity, faces hollowed by desperation as they wait for news of their beloved, who have vanished into the void filled by the endless ranks of the desaparecidos.

One of Bernales's predominant themes is the corrida which, in Latin America, is more violent and bloody than in Spain (now simply a tourist attraction). It is man's struggle against the animal, but also a portrayal of rage (buried in the depths of the artist's soul) against the terrible injustice and tyranny of the authorities landowners, tree-cutters and animal killers.
A stance in defence of nature and of the weaker members of society, who have often sadly had to succumb, crushed by violence. It is the strong, poetic allegory of a past, which she herself has personally experienced on the crest of the mountain of truth-amidst the remains of a civilisation buried along the Camino Real, traversed by the Incas, who were also in search of light and truth.
Now the green destiny that followed her and enabled her to mature in the shadow of the immense forest, has led her to the trees of another enchanted forest inhabited, at the beginning of the last century, by a famous poet, Gabriele D'Annunzio.

The raging bulls of the moonlit nights that populated her father's ancient fairy-tales are now found in La Versiliana, near to the sea whose waves are less tumultuous than those which pound the beaches of Lima.
The same voices, the same colours, portrayals of dramas and expectations, condemnation of an un just society and the poetry of certain flowers that only bloom in one's dreams. Although here she will not find any of the condors that she so admired in Cusco, seagulls, like those in fairy-tales, will come to pay homage to this cultural ambassador of Peru.