Artist Claudia Bernardi Finds Beauty Beyond Brutality

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Claudia Bernardi's "Frescoes On Paper," today through April 27 at Galeria Coqui, 303 Occidental Ave. S.; 521-8693. -----------------------------------------------------------------

Pioneer Square's Galeria Coqui has presented many unique Latino artists to Seattle. But none is more singular than Claudia Bernardi: She's not just an artist, but a forensic anthropologist. She is truly a scientist of the soul.

Bernardi was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She lost both parents before the age of 18, and fled her country in 1979. Bernardi always intended to be an artist. But she feared becoming a desaparecido ("disappeared one") - or one of those cadavers she drew as a student. While Bernardi was studying abroad, however, her sister Patricia became head of Argentina's Forensic Anthropology Unit. The unit's job was exhuming, and then documenting, mass graves of people who died under suspicious circumstances.

In 1981, Claudia joined her sister, at a village in El Salvador. The grave contained the bodies of 131 children. The memory of them, like those she has encountered since in Ethiopia and Guatemala, changed her art profoundly. Her art is now, like her science, complex, layered - and never simple.

Bernardi's chosen form is the fresco on paper; each piece made with 30 to 50 layers of pigment. She applies her often startling colors to wet printmaking paper, then forces it through a press as many as 100 times. The result: Her pigments merge, react to and blend with each other. Afterward, she engraves the fields of color, using rigid porcupine quills as a tool. Bernardi pieces are lush and radiant. But they are also unsettling - filled with ghosts and shadows.

In both her fields, Bernardi has become famous. She has had one-woman shows in Argentina, Great Britain, France, Brazil, El Salvador and Japan - exhibited alongside Luis Cruz Azaceta and Manuel Ocampo. In 1995, Hiroshima's World Peace Center staged a Bernardi show she titled "The Persistence of Hope." Bernardi spent a month in on-site lecturing, explaining how art battles "the sense of hopelessness."

The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Unit has received many honors of its own. This September it will be given another, by the International Commission on Human Rights in Stuttgart, Germany.

While her 11 pieces hang here in Seattle, Bernardi has agreed to lecture on forensics. Her lecture title will be "Art As Witness."

"Such art," she says firmly, "is extremely important. I know it as the alternative to despair." ----------------------------------------------------------------- Artist lecture

Tomorrow at 7 p.m., Claudia Bernardi will give a lecture/slide presentation at 205 Smith Hall, University of Washington.