Brushes of Resistance: Colonial Artists Who Challenged the Hegemonic Order

When we talk about anticolonial art in Latin America, we only think about movements from the 20th century. However, the semblances of visual resistance appeared much earlier, in the very heart of the colonial period, when artists — many indigenous, black or mixed-race — found subtle and powerful ways of subverting the discourse of power from within the system. These creators, ready to be mere copyists of European models, use their brushes to assert identities, make silenced histories visible and dispute the hegemonic social order.

In the 18th century, colonial Habana was the testimony of a revealing paradox. While the Spanish and Spanish elites promoted the founding of the Academy of San Alejandro (1818) with the argument that black people were "dominating" the arts and should be excluded from formal education, there were African-descendant artists of notable talent and awareness. Two figures exemplify this tension: the painter Vicente Escobar and the conspirator leader José Antonio Aponte. Escobar, a free man of color, became the favorite portrait artist of the Habanero elite, immortalizing bishops, captains generals and aristocrats. But his artistic practice was not a simple act of disappearance; After registering as a "painter" in official documents and confirming his works with pride, Escobar claimed professional status and an agency that the colonial order denied to those of his condition. His art, personal and transformative, operated in the visible light, building a respectable black identity in a world that sought to make it invisible.

On the other hand, José Antonio Aponte took visual resistance to a radically different plane. His only known work, a "book of paintings" (now missing), was a collage of images that told a "black universal history", connecting the kings of Europe with Ethiopian emperors and black military hazañas in Cuba. This book, described in judicial archives after his trial for conspiring to organize slave rebellions, was not a simple album; It was a visual weapon that articulated a line of black power, an ancestral memory and a call to insurrection. While Escobar worked on the visible and personal, he operated on the invisible and collective, demonstrating that art could be "historically effective" in transforming colonial identity and mobilizing an entire community.

In the reign of Peru, resistance took more subtle but equally significant forms. At the end of the 18th century, painters such as Cristóbal de Lozano, Cristóbal de Aguilar and José Joaquín Bermejo faced a paradox: they had to portray the elite using archaic conventions that reinforced the stability of the empire in a time of increasing political instability. However, instead of being mere repeaters of European formulas, these Limeño artists invented their own tradition. They introduced pictorial innovations — more complex compositions, ornate surfaces, unusual dynamism — within the framework of the official portrait, thus reflecting the subtle disintegration of the colonized social body. His brushes captured on the ground the appearance of the powerful, but also the fissures of an order that began to recede, adapting the genre of the portrait to American realities and laying the foundations of a visual expression that is uniquely Latin American.

These colonial artists, each in their own way, embodied what we would today call an anti-colonial artistic agency. The flags of rebellion were not always open, but their works — such as elite portraits, prohibited books or formal innovations — disputed the monopoly of representation, asserted subaltern identities and demonstrated that, even under the colonial government, art could be a territory of resistance and the creation of alternative worlds.

Latamarte