The Colombian curator and art critic Miguel González reviews the work of the photographer Patricia Bonilla in minute detail. The review begins with an interesting sentence: “These days it is not unusual to find interrelationships used in ways that are contemporary to us,” which leads González to think of Bonilla’s work as a visual experiment where different disciplines meet. González mentions how Bonilla uses photography as a tool in the initial stages of her work, but not in the final stages of her creations. In Bonilla’s work, photography is the realm from which her creations spring, an experiment with images that reveal her other activity, which is acting. According to González, a transformed body is the central element of Bonilla’s works; that body, which represents other people, inspires an endless succession of interpretations of concepts dictated by the environment. González highlights the ambivalent nature of Bonilla’s work: her constant fluctuation between reality and fiction, between what is true and what is false, which is in itself a characteristic feature of theatrical scene painting.   

The theater, movie, and television actress Patricia Bonilla (b. 1949) uses photographs from her career as part of her artwork. Her exposure to the concept of montage, which suggests a stage setting, influenced her perception of space, and of course, the artificial aspect of performance. This is the approach that Miguel González (b. 1950) takes in his review of Bonilla’s images, which is what makes it so interesting. Collage is a powerful presence in her photographs, so González’s critical reading of her work is appropriate because he analyzes the dual nature of the collage technique that includes a permanent re-signification. It should be noted that Bonilla’s work relates directly to popular culture from which she extracts visual referents that influence the content of her works. Her artwork is imbued with a sense of what came before—a preparation, a rehearsal—which she learned as an actress, in addition to the constant presence of her transformed image, the idea of being someone else in the same body—a concept derived from the art of self-portraiture.   

Although González’s review is about Patricia Bonilla, the notes at the end of his article shed a great deal of light on what was going on in the field of photography in Colombia in the 1980s. He talks about a new generation of photographers whose “greatest experimental strength is based on the manipulation of mechanical media that make the image possible, and on the shrewd use of the image as a form of expression that goes far beyond a simple realistic portrayal.” The names González mentioned here include: Luis Fernando Valencia (b. 1946), Jorge Ortiz (b. 1948), Becky Mayer (b. 1944), and Beatriz Jaramillo (b. 1945), among others.