Loop (B. Lozano, Bolsonaro eve)

In Loop (B. Lozano, Bolsonaro eve), Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu follows the working process she has developed and explored since the mid-2010s: starting from a press photograph that is blurred, cropped, and then transferred onto the canvas as an underlayer, the artist adds a complex stratification of graphic notations using a range of tools and techniques—ink and acrylic brushwork, spray paint, stencils, and digital retouching.

For this painting, Mehretu began with a 2018 photograph of a rally in Brazil featuring fervent supporters of far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. She retained from the image the warm colors (yellow and green) of the Brazilian flag being displayed and waved by demonstrators, but blurred the photograph enough to erase faces and spatial references, keeping only the “DNA” of the image—its spectral force. The human figure does not entirely disappear, however: Mehretu suggests it through the addition of black spray-painted marks—black, vacant eyes and screaming mouths forming a host of ghostly, threatening faces at the heart of the canvas’s acidic color melee.

Mehretu’s recent canvases thus operate through a dynamic choreography of graphic gestures, as the artist’s hand reconnects with the impulsive and seismographic energy of drawing. The use of exuberant colors evokes an underlying sense of threat, unconsciously recalling a traumatic present: the migration crisis, climate disruption, massive wildfires, ecological devastation, the rise of fascism—so many profound upheavals to which Julie Mehretu’s work offers a new, emotionally resonant perspective.