Azul de Prusia

Relationships and tensions that arise between color and history, perception and materiality, picture and painting, are the subject of the remarkable series that Yishai Jusidman has devoted to an extremely thorny problem: How are we to visualize the Shoah? With notable subtlety, Jusidman reworked images of concentration camp spaces and gas chambers, painting them, precisely, with Prussian blue paint.

By resorting to painting, the artist allows us to plunge into the labyrinth of memory, underscoring the excruciating silence and presence contained in those images through a rendering that is at once distancing and faithful to detail. Jusidman’s Prussian Blue series sets into play the political condition of these particular images and of painting in general, in a way that could not be subsumed within the mere portability of a photographic image or the joy found in a well-tempered brushstroke.

Prussian Blue includes texts by Norman Bryson, Cuauhtémoc Medina, and Yishai Jusidman, and is published on the occasion of the exhibition of the series at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.