Guernica Redacted (After Picasso’s Guernica, 1937)

In Guernica Redacted (After Picasso’s Guernica, 1937) (2014), Longo engages with one of Pablo Picasso’s most famous masterpieces, creating the opportunity for a renewed engagement with the Spanish artist’s powerful anti-war statement. Although Picasso and Longo belong to very different artistic and political eras, they are connected by a shared fascination with and condemnation of the human power and violence involved in political oppression. Heavy vertical charcoal stripes fracture Picasso’s already fragmented composition by cutting through the entire picture plane. Feeling that photographs and film clips of wartime events influenced Picasso when he created his black-and-white Guernica, Longo wanted to create a structure that would recall the frames of a film and the flicker of monochrome newsreels of the past, the bars of a prison, or the redaction of sensitive texts.