Haunting hues of silence.

• Author: Roth, David M.
• Position: Works of Argentine printmaker Claudia Bernardi

Though Claudia Bernardi has never been tortured, threatened with death, or forced to witness the atrocities of warring guerrilla armies, she knows more about the lives of those who have survived such horrors than most people care to imagine. A native of Argentina, a country whose government "disappeared" untold thousands of its citizens during her early adulthood in Buenos Aires, Bernardi understands such terror almost intuitively.

For the past five years, the forty-year-old Berkeley, California-based printmaker has taught art to political refugees from El Salvador, many of whom fled during the civil war that claimed an estimated seventy thousand lives and ended in January 1992 with a peace accord between the Salvadoran government and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The accord, which called for the formation of a Truth Commission, paved the way for the investigation of human rights abuses by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Unit, led by Bernardi's sister, Patricia. Among the team's first projects in that country was the exhumation of a mass grave at El Mozote, a village where 131 children were murdered in 1981. As part of her sister's team, Bernardi confronted the horrors her students experienced, and at the project's conclusion she emerged a different person.

Oddly, Bernardi's transformation of the experience into art didn't produce the sort of grisly images one might expect. Unlike Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, two well-known U.S. artists whose point-blank allegorical works reveal the more gruesome aspects of politically motivated terror, Bernardi appears to bypass evil entirely. Her multilayered pastel prints reveal bright, luminous landscapes whose super-saturated colors emanate a soft glow that viscerally telegraphs emotional and psychological states, speaking more about spiritual transcendence than of violence. This impression is only reinforced by the spectral, subterranean figures that populate many of her pictures. And while it is safe to say that most of them are, in fact, dead, they are hardly devoid of spirit. Her prints seem to emphasize the living aspects of the victims (as opposed to the grisly details of their deaths). The decision, she recalls, was not conscious; however, in retrospect, she knows now that the choice was influenced directly by her work with Salvadoran refugees and her emotional response to El Mozote.

For openers, Bernardi says her students rarely depict actual violence in their art. At the Kala Institute Gallery, a Berkeley printmaking facility where Bernardi works and teaches, she shows a visitor the output of her star pupils...