Collateral Damage: Dismembered bodies, warped minds

Art confronts us with the truth. The human capacity to feel is being destroyed, more "collateral damage"

of the drug war.

Dismembered bodies, warped minds - Los Angeles Times: "'People are losing the ability to be shocked, and when you lose the capacity for shock, it creates an opening for worse things,' Pablo Szmulewicz, a Mexico City artist, said. 'The reality is so harsh, so heartbreaking, that people look the other way to survive.

The 55-year-old painter has no idea where he will exhibit his new work, a series of paintings depicting discarded bodies, bound and blindfolded and lying in heaps; rows of severed heads, arrayed on shelves and eerily lifelike, are based on photos of real victims, bruises and all. But he hopes to challenge what he sees as a growing societal callousness to the carnage that is Mexico's drug war.

"My concern is that there is no opposition to the barbarity, to the insanity," Szmulewicz said. "It can't be part of our daily landscape."'"

Nov. 8, 2010