Maahes (Mihos) torch

For Maahes (Mihos) torch, Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu continues the working process she has been exploring since the mid-2010s: starting from a blurred and cropped press photograph transferred onto canvas, the artist adds a complex network of graphic marks using various tools and techniques—digital halftone patterns, ink and acrylic brushwork, spray guns, stencils...

For this painting, Mehretu began with a 2018 photograph depicting the traumatic nighttime fire that ravaged the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, destroying nearly all of the institution’s collections. From the photograph—converted to black and white—she retained only the flames and clouds of smoke, removing any spatial reference points and preserving only the “DNA” of the image: its spectral power. The use of digital image-editing processes is particularly visible here: the halftone mesh creates a net-like pattern that merges with the dynamic choreography of layered graphic gestures on the canvas, as the artist’s hand reconnects with the impulsive and seismographic force of drawing.

The combination of acidic colors, shrill gestures, and atmospheric effects 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 charged perspective.