11/05/2026
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
“Absence as Trace”
Under the direction and curatorship of Manuel Segade, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents Collection. Contemporary Art: 1975–Present, a re-reading of its collection occupying the fourth floor of the Sabatini building, proposing the present as a space traversed by political, social, and affective tensions that have shaped the last decades.
Within this context, we encounter the works of two Colombian artists, Beatriz González and Luis Fernando Zapata, whose practices not only articulate a precise reflection on memory, mourning, and the limits of representation, but also propose two radically distinct yet complementary ways of confronting absence.
In González, mourning is inscribed within the persistence of the image and its capacity to construct collective memory through repetition; in Zapata, by contrast, it shifts toward a territory in which matter itself assumes and condenses absence. Rather than opposing one another, their practices configure a field of resonance where the collective and the intimate intertwine and mutually interrogate each other: an experience oscillating between the image that insists and the absence that becomes embodied.
In Room 7, “Pandemic and Language,” the curatorial axis situates itself at a moment of rupture: during the 1980s, the emergence of HIV/AIDS and the rise of he**in consumption profoundly altered affective relations and challenged the relationship between representation and reality. There, Objeto ritual (1989) and Sarcófago No. 4 (1992–1994), by Luis Fernando Zapata, emerge as structures in which matter assumes what the image can no longer sustain. There is neither illustration nor narrative: there is presence. They neither describe nor allude: they affirm.
Zapata’s practice does not respond to representations associated with illness; rather, it is grounded in a deeper condition: the fracture between what is visible and what is endured. It arises from an awareness of the fragility of the body and the uncertainty of life, formulated as the trace of an absence.
In Room 10, “Mourning: The Triumph of Fiction,” the curatorial framework reveals how the relationship between image and reality becomes radically altered.
Mourning ceases to be strictly individual and shifts toward a collective dimension, marked by a loss without stable referent. It is thus configured through a double condition: collective in the face of violence, and structural in relation to the loss of reference.
Art abandons all complacency and confronts a different form of absence: no longer that of the body, but that of meaning itself.
Within this horizon appears Beatriz González with A posteriori (2022): a wallpaper installation occupying the entirety of the space. Her work introduces a form of mourning structured through repetition: gravestones reproducing the silhouettes of figures carrying corpses; their reiteration saturates the visual field and becomes persistence. Memory becomes experience.
Here, the image does not disappear: it insists. The viewer becomes immersed within it. Repetition does not explain; it compels one to remain and to construct memory. A posteriori was first presented in the exhibition Bruma (Espacio Fragmentos, 2022) and revisits her intervention in the columbaria of Bogotá’s Central Cemetery, Auras anónimas (2007–2009), now declared a cultural heritage site.
Throughout the exhibition, one certainty imposes itself: before the works of Luis Fernando Zapata and Beatriz González, we are directly confronted with the idea of death. Absence manifests itself as trace: a memory that does not extinguish itself. It persists.
In González, this memory is constructed through the image, which no longer functions as document: it becomes insistence. Drawing from archives and from the repetition of motifs, mourning ceases to be individual in order to become a collective experience. Faced with a society that, as the artist herself has observed, has grown accustomed to war and to its dead, her practice insists on remembering. It is not a matter of illustrating loss, but of giving it a place. To remember is an act of resistance against oblivion.
In Zapata, this same problematic is situated within a material and symbolic register. Here there is no image in the traditional sense, but rather matter and presence. Each form is constructed from signs that do not describe, configuring an imaginary archaeology. Matter does not illustrate: it contains; it is simultaneously support and meaning. Death does not appear as an end; it is transition.
If in González mourning expands outward, in Zapata it condenses into forms moving from the intimate toward the ancestral: two ways of approaching the same condition — making visible that which cannot be represented without falling into description. Not death as fact, but absence as experience: a presence that does not disappear… it remains.
Reinaldo Annicchiarico
Paris, April 12, 2026
