The Warrior / Guerrero

The Warrior is one of the last completed paintings by Carrillo before his passing. The painting depicts a nude indigenous Mexican man holding a shield in one hand and a mesoamerican weapon called the macuahuitl in his other. A fellow warrior has been slain by an arrow to the right of the main figure while above him he is being pummeled by a conquistador and bitten by the attacker’s white war horse as Spanish ships sail into view in the distance. At the time of this painting Carrillo was in the last year of his life and in a lot of pain. In this context if we identify The Warrior as a metaphorical self portrait, the painting can be seen as the artist reflecting on his connection to his ancestors who fought and died before him, empathizing with losing an impossible battle. Here Carrillo is an Azteca-Mexican warrior who has fought his hardest and is shown at the moment before he is overcome. This is also a last act of a Chicano activist artist to remind the viewer of the horrors of colonialism and the continued inequities imposed on those descended from fallen warriors such as these.

Photo courtesy of The Crocker Art Museum

EC.0206