La Capilla del Hombre

La Capilla del Hombre, "the chapel of Man", is amuseumhousing the artwork of Guayasamín, a famous 20th century artist from Quito. His works depict the struggles and suffering of downtrodden people. A tour through his paintings is an unsettling journey through Ecuador’s turbulent history. He does well to illustrate the pain and sadness of having lost friends and colleagues in insurrections and political upheavals throughout South America. The Chapel’s contemplative environment and Guayasamin’s impressive larger-than-life paintings refreshed my memory of Latin American history, the root of Ecuador’s continuous struggles and challenges.

In his time a good friend of Fidel Castro and Chaves, Guayasamín was an idealist who protested enslavement in Africa, European cruelty and Indigenous rights with his artwork. He had a heart for the suffering population from Hiroshima victims and Jew’s in the World-wars to mothers who lost children in Chilean catastrophes to the general starvingpeoples of his impoverished continent. He dreamed of a new sort of social system that would rescue and empower those at the bottom. The following a few of his words and works that, for me, evoked a lot of emotion.

• “Art encompasses life; it is a way to love.”

• This girl is LatinAmerica. She is mestizo, waking up at her earlypre-colombian beginnings. The different shades and colors represent her people’s mix of race and origin.

• “Painting is a sort of prayer as well as a cry."

Two portrayals of Jesus’ death. In the painting on the left Guayasamin took Quarton’s famous painting and made is fit into a latin-american context. Jesus, it appears is dying from hunger or malnutrition rather than his death on the cross. There is no halo over the heads of the saints and the use of red reflects Guayasamin’s emotional component.

I loved this picture because each square can actually more to create a new sort of story and meaning for the piece as a whole. The different images reflect Ecuador and its various struggles.