In September 1978, the Security Statute was implemented in Colombia, a fearsome law decreed by President Julio Cesar Turbay to counter the insurgent operations of the M-19 and suppress any popular uprisings such as the National Strike of 1977. However, the Statute gave the military forces disproportionate power to repress, prosecute, and convict citizens, restricting fundamental freedoms such as the right to political opinion and dissent, assembly, movement, and public protest. With the abuse of power legitimized by presidential order, surprise raids, clandestine arrests, torture, and extrajudicial executions became commonplace, resulting in 4,098 arbitrary arrests in 1979 and 6,819 in 1980, in addition to 485 forced disappearances carried out by the army between 1978 and 1981.

Only one month after the Statute was implemented, Carlos Granada (Honda, 1933 – Bogotá, 2015) presented his series Hacia Fuera Entrand o at the Belarca Gallery. This series depicted military trials, torture, and executions, anticipating the drastic measures of the Turbay government that would come later. It also continued the themes and denunciations addressed by Granada in his series El color de la vida y el color de la muerte (The color of life and the color of death), presented at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art in 1976 and described by the press as “a kind of amphitheater where, summoned by the unleashed violence, life is offered in confrontation with repression, open pain challenging the morbidity of the torturers of freedom…”

Since the late 1950s, Carlos Granada's painting had been dedicated to an art of denunciation that revealed the ravages of the bipartisan conflict. In 1963, he won first prize for painting at the National Salon of Artists with a work on the repercussions of violence in rural populations (Solo con su muerte). His association with other artists who also conceived of artistic manifestations as a means of disseminating the harsh reality of the country led him to form collective projects such as Testimonios (1965–1967, with Norman Mejía, Pedro Alcántara, and Augusto Rendón) and Taller Cuatro Rojo (1972–1979, with Nirma Zarate, Diego Arango, Umberto Giangrandi, Jorge Mora, and Fabio Rodríguez Amaya).

Despite the widespread fear among artists and intellectuals of speaking out against official policies and the Security Statute, Granada did not hesitate to mention the inspiration for his works in 1978: “My work does not refer only to that Colombian historical period called La violencia, but to a much broader period that encompasses the present, in which violence is presented daily in the form of crime reports, muggings, robbery, etc., etc., and even more so, officialized violence.”

Granada '75 –'78: reflections of official violence reviews, with works from that context - from the series Hacia fuera entrando (1978) and El color de la vida y el color de la muerte (1976) - the artist's premonitory and rapid reaction in those critical times.

(Curated by Christian Padilla and written by Christian Padilla)