Guardián de mi hermano (My Brother's Keeper)

The artist's task is to redeem hunger.

This does not mean feeding all the malnourished people in the world, not even the few the artist encounters on the streets or at their door. The work of art is not about redemption in that sense.

To redeem is to rescue. It is about rescuing hunger from the spurious uses to which it has always been — and continues to be — exposed: the electoral purposes of corrupt politics, the manipulative frenzy of the media, the guilt-inducing aims of moralism, and the dominating purposes of religion.

Hunger — the ultimate powerlessness — has too often been placed at the service of power.

This is precisely why the artist redeems hunger: because art is powerless. As suggested by the title of a brief story by Kafka, every artist should aspire to be a "hunger artist" — someone who understands emptiness and lack, who feels in their own body the sting of nothingness, and who exposes their ribs and thin flesh to the harshness of the night.

If the artist wraps themselves in fame and glitter, if they use their work to adorn and glorify themselves, if they paint or sculpt in pursuit of fame, then they become skilled decorators or masters of spectacle — but not true artists. That is to say, truth will not be revealed in their work, for it will have become complicit with the powers that conceal and betray it.

In Myriam's images, truth struggles to surface. Painfully, like a difficult birth, something emerges from the other side of the canvas, carving furrows of silenced screams, tearing through tissues that groan and fibers that rip, opening cracks.

Endless open mouths wait, plead, and demand — they are also countless eyes that accuse and command, where begging and demanding share the same expression, both denouncing the same inequity.

The images of hunger are explosive in their powerlessness. They reveal what is meant to remain hidden, howl where silence reigns, and sting where indifference and complacency dominate. They uncover.

They lift the veils thrown over the discomfort of otherness by moral righteousness and political correctness, disrupting the peaceful sleep of those who rest on beds of charity and benevolence. They speak face to face, summon, and confront. Like God with Cain — and earlier with Adam, anesthetized in Eden's dream — they remind us that to be human is to be our brother's keeper, responsible for their hunger.

The task of the artist is to uncover.