Amnesis is not an apocalyptic art; nonetheless, it is tinged with a major preoccupation of our age: humanity as its own destroyer; the apocalypse as the culmination of our thoughtless acts.  In the final explosion of the pitiful whimper, we may be unable to discern where it all originated.  As poet Duane Locke expressed it, we will know we must destroy the world but we will remember why.    

  The nuclear bomb fell in human consciousness in 1945; its mushroom clouds have perhaps since overwhelmed or deadened human imagination.  We cannot conceive it any more because its destructive potential, its burst of terrifying power, has been aestheticized - it is part of modern folklore.  We see it as an event that, although capable of causing a momentary horror, fascinates us with its power and visual delight, an elation most of us felt when, as children, we played with oversized and prohibited fire-crackers.  And the theme persists; it stalks us daily.  It is a theme that for artists appears unavoidable - and impossible. And yet we must grapple with its contours.  An artist can only touch upon it, with a light, tangential touch, or be consumed by the fire of its enormity.  

      Amnesis artists José Rodeiro, Mirta Tocci, John Wissemann, and Bartolomeo Esteban Safc concern themselves directly or indirectly with the theme of apocalypse.  Rodeiro's painting Chernobyl, Mon Amour, occasioned by the 1986 nuclear accident in the Soviet Union, presents a sensual, fashionable woman leaning on a bar counter.  She has the look of a cover girl, inviting and indifferent, uninhibited and narcissistic.  She is approached by a mysterious figure seen from the back who is cropped in half.  This personage is the intriguing and grotesque androgynous character of other recent paintings by Rodeiro,  The brilliant, flame-like design of his shirt suggests power and aggressiveness.  he seems at the point of overtaking the woman, and we sense that he could overwhelm and deprave anyone.  Is this grotesque figure a symbol of the end of the world?  does it represent the destructive power of radiation?  The title of the painting suggests such symbolism: it refers to the Resnais / Duras film Hiroshima, Mon Amour, which tells of the unbridgeable break in the human bond between victim and victimizer, for so much suffering corrupts love, renders love impossible.  In Rodeiro's painting, there is no hint at even the intention of love between the central characters.  the woman at the bar looks at us with a penetrating stare, as though to seduce us into becoming accomplices in our destruction, a destruction that already seems to work around her, as the scene seems set in a sort of underground bunker. 

       The theme of imminent destruction is intimated with metaphysical overtones by Mirta Tocci's statues.  Though derivative of classical, baroque, and mannerist sculpture, Tocci's figures also reflect the gargantuan, apocalyptic beings depicted by Goya.  In Goya's painting Panic, an immense giant with an indifferent, brutal face is seen striding across a landscape teeming with minute clashing armies.  Similar miniature scenes of chaos and devastation are contained in the musculature and clothing of Tocci's figures, the rough contours of whose back supports are suggestive of great cloud-like explosions.  The fact that such violent microcosmic episodes are attached directly to the figures themselves, like Lilliputians on the body of Gulliver, might well imply the indivisibility of impending worldwide disaster from its smaller, localized counterparts.  

      John Wissemann's painting Four Horsemen refers more directly to the apocalypse by parodying the famous, biblically inspired wood engraving by Albrecht Dürer.  Wissemann has divested Dürer's figures of their solid, full-bodied volume, presenting them as cloud-like ghosts whose horses, unlike Dürer's, are galloping in a mad race toward oblivion.  Wissemann has also satirized Dürer's reference to divine intervention.  Instead of an archangel floating above the horsemen, he has depicted two geese which, comically vulgarizing the import of the biblical apocalypse, are trumpeting what what the painting seems to suggest is the culminating event in a series of essentially banal acts.