Reframing the Dove, the Rifle, and the Faces

Débora Arango’s Gift to Álvaro Uribe

Abstract

Débora Arango is considered by critics to be an outstanding artist, both in her use of painting as political denunciation, and for being a woman who used her art to challenge gender roles and the conservative values of her time. However, before her death and during the office of Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002–2010), Arango gifted the president a drawing he commissioned, which he made a symbol of his government by inserting a text between the sketch and its frame. From the vantage point of the image’s public archive, how should this be interpreted as part of Uribe’s political iconography? This _Article aesthetically and politically reframes the ex-president’s partial bracketing of the artist’s work by means of his discourse, by outlining a broader picture that considers first a contextualization of Uribe’s discursive appropriation of only half of the drawing for his propagandistic ends—currently the dominant discourse on it; and second, presents the artist’s political oeuvre as an interpretative repertoire, mapping the image’s critical potential by evoking its affectively charged visual tropes or Pathosformel.