Tin Sheds Gallery, University of Sydney, Australia, March 2002
“Entering this exhibit is like being trapped in an unsettling nightmare. Walls of thick plastic sheeting covered in strange gloomy light lead you into a teasing maze. An eerie soundscape plays elsewhere in the space, a maelstrom of stormy winds melded with a pattering heartbeat. Bernardo Gonzalez-Barreto’s massive installation almost fills the entire gallery. Deep in the midst of it all, it is possible to make out other transparent corridors as you pass by in the blurry darkness. There is one guiding symbol, a luminous cord across the enveloping plastic, but it never eliminates suggestions that you are in some kind of horrible meat works, or claustrophobically caught below deck in a boat in a howling gale. Sometimes it’s like passing an endless shower curtain, hung for a horror film that is set in a bathroom.
In the final room a film projected on the wall and the source of the soundtrack is discovered. In the style of a video game, the viewer is taken through a digital representation of the maze they have just completed. This time, however, the walls are concrete or brick, covered with graffiti-“History repeats itself, not”- written over and over again. Finally, as the camera catapults out of the maze and into a cloudy abyss, the maze can be seen from above. It is only then that viewers realise what it is they have just walked through (I won’t ruin it for you).”
Lenny Ann Low, Sydney Morning Herald March 9-10 2002