“Cuando las Miradas no Alcanzan,” 47×47″, oil on canvas, 2005
Gonzalo is an artist from Colombia, site of some of the must brutal violence in the sad history of the Banana Republics. His grandfather worked for United Fruit (Chiquita), and tried – Gonzolo told me in an email – to paint a more sympathetic picture of the banana giant, which was responsible for the massacre of at least 1,000 banana workers during a strike in 1929 (the bloodshed was fictionalized by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in “100 Years of Solitude.”
The conflict between differing versions of the story – and Gonzalo’s own soul-searching about the relationship between the fruit, his own life, his culture, and his family give his work a high level of intensity (which is enhanced by the size of his canvases – some bigger than eight feet across.) I love these paintings. The feel both documentary and impressionistic, all at once.
“A Prueba de Eternidades,” 50 x 50″, oil on canvas, 2007
“Camouflage of Frustration,” 42 x 50″, charcoal/paper, 2004
*This title, “United gui Stand,” is a pun on both the name “United Fruit” and the Colombian word for bananas, “guineos,” which is pronounced sort of like an “h” in Spanish. The intentional misspelling of “United” is an onomatopoeic rendering of the produce giant’s name (therefore: United We Stand.)
(Much) more at Gonzalo’s site.
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman 
