PAINTING AS A FAIRY-TALE
By Toty Carpentieri

" My father knew how to amuse us - even in the most isolated country side where there were not many distractions - with his invented but real stories, metaphors almost without end, designed perhaps to make us think and reflect. Then, on those nights when there was a full moon, we all went out walking to admire the "new" colours of the grass, to follow the course of the silvery river and look at that blue starry sky. We children, myself and my brothers and sisters, involved in interminable competitions to see who could count more stars. One, two, three… a thousand times a thousand…

Whilst admiring and seeing her sorting through the canvasses for her show (being held at the Fabbrica dei Pinoli at the Versiliana), Gabriela Bernales began to tell me about her childhood in the high Andean plains of Cuzco, an ancient Inca capital in the Urubamba an Apurimac valley. Her paintings, which combine an astonishing and surprising humanity , at time joyful and serene, at others angry and painful, are often arranged according to narrative articulated within a context of emotion and recognition. Figures and then images of nude females, and then bulls and bullfighters. Endless bulls and just as many bullfighters.
It is obvious that nowadays, nobody tells Gabriela these, or any other tales.

The romantic theme of her fight for existence, of that on-going battle between life and death, now belongs to a harder more complex reality, as if it were a sort of moveable feast. Is it nor perhaps true that, where most people are in question, cruelty appears to be a determining common denominator"? in fact, her slow evolution as she travels from Mozambique to Cecenia, Central America, Bosnia, Africa and Asia involves us in a manner that is increasingly subtle and direct. Or should I say it carries us away.
What do these battles between bulls and bulls and bullfighters entail?

"….herds of raging bulls emerged from that like…" Gabriela's words still resound in one's ears.
Hence the explanation for these recent works and themes in which protagonists are simultaneously man and beast, in a sort of " intentional confusion", leading to an explicit inversion of roles. " I am not sure whether these are good or bad angels…" wrote a friend, Rafael Alberti, for other reasons and about others things.

The moment at which the bullfighter plunges his dagger- a symbol of might transcending all barriers and all species - the last of a suerte suprema is, in the end, nothing but a gesture (but isn't this perhaps what According to a contemporary ritual of pleasure and pain, death and joyfulness: everything that takes place within the arena but also to the watching crowd.
In all of this it is likely, in addition to the Dutch Vincent, the son of a Protestant minister sees by her us a purely cultural reference, the young Peruvian artist also looked towards Picasso, from whom she received continuous and multiple stimuli.

Artistically in line with an expressive norm linked to figurative representation and reality - way beyond any purely chronicle-type aspect - in all her works ( even those belonging to previous period and which, for obvious and understandable reasons, are not on show at this exhibition), Gabriela Bernales refutes those expressionist roots tending towards complex, modulated painting rich in disturbing expressive deformations ( her European stay and her Milanese studies within Brera's creative context which, at particicular moments, border on a certain manner of abstraction. She makes use of artistic space, where the tension appears to be subjected to a sort of infinite expansion, and the subject (whatever it might be) loses the limit of its own body and definition, not only in the contemporary multiplicity of the crowd of images but also in the infinite variations of chromatic relationships: yellows, violets, the green, and that barren, severe volcanic red which is almost painful.

Thus making allusive anxieties, which, for different reasons, bring to mind definite verses by Garcia Lorca.

It is as if colour were transfigured, almost abstract. This is true even when she catches the moment of tension and the glare of a bloody corrida on her canvas. Legible, there transpires a sort of expressive acrimony. This is, however, only apparent.

And her work shows the same tension that Gabriela feels when she reveals herself as the Pintora, inventing images that are true but not real ( in the place of those bulls there are now women who convey a sort of obvious sensuality, but also a subtle, serene eroticism ranging from the highly recognisable Norma Jean Baker to all the other unknown or almost anonymous figures), whose formation is just as complex and imbued with a particular atmosphere.
Mario Pomara who knows her well, writes about do ima sosrta do" peruvianita", bringing to mind the role played by the Cuzco school and religion while she was growing up, identifying them as the humanity that pervades her painting in a positive and personal representation of emotive states.
And when looking at these paintings, both together and in sequence, Gabriela Bernales's entire world is revealed in a sort of successive momentos de la verdad , describing everything she has actually experienced.
It is true that her painting is an objectification of reality, but also a tale of that solitary journey of her conscience which, in addition to the fragments, shapes and turbulent cumulus of colours and lights, leads us to understand the mystery of life, in a sort of personal, modes and boundless prayer for freedom.