Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. You think you understand contemporary art because you attend openings at trendy galleries and can name three emerging artists? Let me tell you about María Berrío, this Colombian artist who dethrones your prefabricated idols with a subversive delicacy that you have probably never grasped.
In her recent exhibition “The End of Ritual” at the Victoria Miro gallery in London, Berrío presents nine large collage paintings that shake our perceptions like an earthquake beneath our feet. These monumental works do not kindly invite you to contemplate them; they draw you into their universe with the intensity of a cosmic black hole.
If you are looking for artworks that merely decorate your sterile living rooms, move along. Berrío works like an obsessive surgeon, cutting and layering delicate Japanese papers, applying watercolors and sometimes charcoal strokes to create multi-layered glued surfaces. The result? Compositions that bring together fragmented memories, shattered identities, and scattered stories with a coherence that verges on an artistic miracle.
Let us pause for a moment on her technique. Each work is a meticulous testimony of layered papers, as if the artist were patiently reconstructing a broken world, piece by piece. This method is not just a technical feat; it embodies the central metaphor of her work: survival in a fractured world requires gathering fragments to make sense of the chaos. This is precisely what Berrío does through her collages: she reassembles a semblance of order from disparate pieces, while keeping visible the fragility inherent in this reconstruction.
For most of the exhibited works, Berrío collaborated with members of the New York dance collective GALLIM. Can you imagine the scene? The artist provided costumes to the troupe, notably those feline masks with unsettling realism that appear in several paintings, then photographed the dancers mid-performance to serve as references for her paintings. The result is striking: expressive gestures captured from disturbing angles, as in “Cheyava Falls” (2024), where unnatural poses suggest a forced performance, reflecting the pressure to conform in a space where personal autonomy is often compromised.
What immediately strikes in these works is their claustrophobic quality. The perspectives seem deliberately distorted, the angles flattened, and the figures show skewed proportions. These distortions are not technical errors but deliberate choices that convey the artist’s unsettling vision. The worlds she creates are both familiar and deeply strange, as if we were viewing reality through a distorting prism.
In “The Spectators,” a dancer trying on a costume in a clothing factory lifts her mask to fix us with her gaze. In the background, under the watchful eye of a male supervisor, rows of seamstresses observe the scene. This interplay between observers and the observed poses a fundamental question: what does it mean to look and to be looked at? Who truly holds the power in this dynamic of gazes?
Several works, including “Elysium Mons” and “Anseris Mons,” draw their titles from volcanoes located on Mars. These paintings depict subjects whose faces, when not hidden beneath masks, are almost indistinguishable among their costumes with complex patterns and heavy stage makeup. Through this choice of titles, Berrío seems to draw our attention to humanity’s insignificance in the vastness of the cosmos, reminding us of our humble position in a vast and unpredictable universe.
The fragmented and layered clothing of the figures resembles shifting topographies, an effect enhanced by the use of disjointed perspectives by the artist, plunging us into the destabilized worlds she depicts. The delicate materials Berrío applies on her canvases strongly contrast with her chaotic compositions and evoke the vulnerability of humanity and the environment. These works are metaphors of survival, assembling fragments to make sense of a broken world.
Subverting the Spanish conquistadors’ dream of the mythical South American golden city, Berrío’s “El Dorado” depicts a lively market scene but devoid of material treasures, presenting an alternative perspective on value. In the foreground, a figure serves food from a cart. To the right, groups of children play while simply dressed adults relax and socialize. On the left, at an obtuse angle, a woman dressed in an elaborate and seemingly expensive outfit lies awkwardly on a chair. The juxtaposition of these different characters, both in terms of composition and appearance, evokes the power imbalance associated with societal hierarchies and highlights the dehumanizing aspects of materialism. For Berrío, true wealth seems to reside in human connections, not in gold.
But beyond this obvious social critique, Berrío’s work is part of a deep exploration of the carnivalesque and the theatrical. The masks and costumes appearing in her works are not merely decorative accessories; they constitute a visual language that explores notions of identity, transformation, and social performance.
The mask, in particular, is a recurrent and complex motif in her work. The quintessential ambivalent object, the mask reveals as much as it conceals. It allows the wearer to free herself from usual inhibitions while creating a protective barrier between the individual and the outside world. In Berrío’s works, the feline masks create an atmosphere both playful and sinister, suggesting that our social interactions are themselves forms of ritualized masquerades.
This performative dimension is enhanced by the artist’s collaboration with professional dancers. The moving body becomes a vehicle of expression that transcends the limits of verbal language. The gestures captured in her paintings, often twisted, stretched, or frozen in uncomfortable positions, suggest complex emotional states that resist simple interpretation.
There is something deeply theatrical in Berrío’s approach. Her compositions resemble scenes from surreal plays where actors are caught between contradictory forces: the desire for authenticity and the pressures of social conformity, individual expression and collective expectations, personal freedom and institutional constraints.
Theater, as a system of signs and conventions, offers a fruitful parallel for understanding Berrío’s work. In theater, we collectively accept a fiction while remaining aware of its artificial nature. Similarly, the worlds created by Berrío operate according to a coherent internal logic while constantly signaling their constructed nature through impossible perspectives and unlikely juxtapositions.
Critic Fredric Jameson wrote that “history is what hurts, it is what refuses desire” [1]. This phrase resonates particularly with Berrío’s work, which acknowledges historical pain, notably that related to forced displacements, migrations, and political violence, while insisting on the possibility of desire and imagination as forces of resistance.
Because despite the symbolic violence permeating her works, Berrío maintains an unwavering faith in humanity’s ability to create beauty from chaos. Her art is a form of aesthetic resistance affirming that even in a fractured world, the creative act remains a vital source of meaning and connection.
In this, her work echoes sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s theories on “liquid modernity” [2], a contemporary condition characterized by the permanent instability of identities, relationships, and institutions. In such a context, Bauman suggests, individuals are constantly forced to reinvent themselves in the face of ever-changing social structures.
The figures populating Berrío’s paintings seem precisely engaged in this process of continual reinvention. Their fragmented bodies, their masked or obscured faces, their incongruous poses, all these elements suggest identities in flux, beings in transition negotiating their place in a world whose rules constantly change.
What Berrío captures so masterfully is this fundamental tension between fragmentation and cohesion, between dissolution and recomposition. Her collages, meticulously constructed from hundreds of torn paper pieces then carefully assembled, literally embody this process. The technique thus perfectly complements the message: form and content merge into a coherent expression of our contemporary condition.
But Berrío goes beyond a simple sociological observation. Her work contains a deeply utopian dimension that deserves to be emphasized. Through her chaotic but carefully orchestrated compositions, she suggests the possibility of harmony emerging from disorder, a community reforming after catastrophe.
In particular, her treatment of female figures is revealing. The women who inhabit her works are not depicted as passive victims of the forces that move them, but as active agents of their own destiny. Their direct gaze, their affirmed physical presence, their intimate relationship with their environment, all these elements suggest a form of silent but powerful resistance.
This feminist dimension is not anecdotal in Berrío’s work. It is part of a Latin American artistic tradition that has often used the female body as a site of political and social contestation. As demonstrated by the exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985” (presented at the Brooklyn Museum in 2018), Latin American female artists have historically developed innovative visual strategies to challenge patriarchal and colonial power structures.
Berrío is part of this lineage while developing a distinctly contemporary visual language. Her multicultural-inspired collages, which incorporate Japanese techniques and materials into compositions with Colombian references, reflect a globalized sensibility that transcends simplistic categorizations.
The artist herself has mentioned how her work is fueled by her immigration experience: “It’s similar to my way of thinking. I assemble ideas from reality, imagination, everything I see and feel. When you look at these works, there is a chaotic feeling that sometimes leads to abstraction, and it’s similar in my head. My ideas are chaotic and very emotional” [3].
This statement reveals how intrinsically linked Berrío’s creative process is to her personal experience of displacement and adaptation. Her collages are not simply aesthetic objects detached from reality but concrete manifestations of a diasporic consciousness constantly navigating between different worlds, languages, and systems of reference.
There is something deeply cinematic in the way Berrío constructs her images. The unexpected framing, surreal juxtapositions, multiple perspectives, all these elements evoke film editing techniques, where meaning emerges from the collision between different shots.
This cinematic quality is particularly evident in works like “The Spectators,” where different scenes seem to unfold simultaneously in a compressed space. The viewer’s eye is invited to navigate the canvas surface like a camera moving through different space-times, gradually revealing new narrative dimensions.
To be honest, what I like the most about Berrío’s work is her ability to create artworks that function on different levels of reading. At first glance, her collages captivate with their formal beauty, chromatic richness, and technical virtuosity. But the more you linger, the more you discover layers of meaning hidden within, subtle socio-political commentary, historical allusions, and psychological resonances.
This complexity is rare in the contemporary artistic landscape, where too many works settle either for empty formalism or simplistic political messages. Berrío, however, refuses this reductive dichotomy. Her art is both visually captivating and intellectually stimulating, sensual and cerebral, personal and political.
In an era where attention is a scarce commodity and most images are consumed within seconds on screens, Berrío’s collages demand and reward prolonged contemplation. They resist the logic of instantaneity and invite a form of deeper, more meditative engagement.
Perhaps this is where the true radicality of her work lies: in her insistence on slowness, complexity, and ambiguity at a time characterized by speed, simplification, and polarization. Her collages remind us that some experiences, whether aesthetic, emotional, or existential, cannot be reduced to simple formulas or unequivocal messages.
Returning to the exhibition “The End of Ritual,” this title is particularly evocative. In a world where traditional rituals are gradually losing their hold, where communities are fragmenting, and certainties are collapsing, what becomes of our ability to give meaning to our existence? How do we maintain a sense of social cohesion in the face of the centrifugal forces of individualism and technology?
These questions implicitly traverse Berrío’s work. Her collages can be seen as attempts to create new visual rituals for a post-traditional era, new mythologies for a disenchanted world. Through her meticulously handcrafted process, she reaffirms the value of time, attention, and care in a culture of acceleration and distraction.
By capturing moments of resilience and transformation, Berrío’s striking paintings celebrate the ability of communities to come together in the face of chaos. At a time when political structures are collapsing, “The End of Ritual” reminds us that autonomy can be reclaimed, even amid disorder.
And if you are not convinced after all this, I seriously wonder what you are doing in a contemporary art gallery. Maybe you should go back to your bogus NFTs and let the adults appreciate the real work of an artist who, unlike so many others, truly has something to say and knows how to say it extraordinarily.
- Fredric Jameson, “The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act”, Cornell University Press, 1981.
- Zygmunt Bauman, “Liquid Modernity”, Polity Press, 2000.
- María Berrío, Interview with Artnet News, 2024.
- Victoria Looseleaf, “María Berrío: ‘A Cloud’s Roots'”, Art Now LA, 2019.
