In this text, Colombian artist Libia Posada Restrepo discusses her exhibition Evidencia Clínica II and how the images in it depart from the norms of the traditional portrait genre. It is on the basis of a reflection on the place of images of women in portraits throughout history that Posada Restrepo formulates this series of works. She sees the “domestic” sphere as a space where events not visible in art take place, events that go unrepresented because they are not in keeping with socially acceptable visual codes. The theme of Re-tratos is women who have suffered physical violence. She envisions these photographs as an “exercise” in which “the idea of the public and of the private” clash, that is, a confrontation between “what is said and what is hidden” in a society. Posada Restrepo replaces some of the portraits in the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional of Colombia with images of battered women. To close the text, Posada Restrepo explains that the work “is a sort of contamination of the collection that demonstrates the symptoms of a collective pathology whose existence we set out to acknowledge.”

In her work, Libia Posada Restrepo (b. 1959) formulates an intersection between art and medicine. Thanks to her knowledge of both fields, she finds formal solutions with considerable impact not only on a visual level, but also due to the subject addressed. The fact that she is a surgeon, artist, and woman is evident in her work. The Re-tratos series, for instance, is a caustic exploration of the theme of “the feminine.” The subtlety of the typical photograph of a woman’s face is interrupted by the mark of a blow, an element with a direct impact on the image that serves to disturb the viewer as well.  

Posada Restrepo explains that these works—like Evidencia Clínica [Clinical Evidence] (2006)—are based on real events. For that project, she worked with fifty women from the city of Medellín who had suffered physical abuse. The work reflects on the circumstances that continue to permit the physical abuse of women to be hidden in the home. The viewer, in turn, is jarred by photographs that depart from the norms of classic academic portraits where women are depicted as beautiful, passive, or erotic.  

Posada Restrepo’s text discusses her art on the basis of scientific knowledge. It also explores social spheres related to disabled bodies and hospital instruments. In this work, cold spaces prevail and individuals are displaced by the experience of torture, bodily fragmentation, and mental abuse. Posada Restrepo’s work addresses, sometimes ironically, unreported violence and the substitution of parts of bodies, giving shape to a medical and expressive vision unique in Colombian visual art.