Force of Wall

Rafael Cauduro’s mural The Seven Crimes of Justice, situated in the Supreme Court of Mexico, speaks to the old problem of the relationship between art, politics and the State. In Mexico City, the birthplace of modern muralism, Rafael Cauduro confronts its ambivalent legacy and offers up new solutions. And at the same time, at the very heart of the legal system, Cauduro presents a critique of law and justice almost unprecedented in its uncompromising determination to lay bare the brutality of contemporary legal phenomena, not just in Mexico but around the world. This essay examines how Cauduro’s aesthetic choices address the history of modern muralism, and how his thematic choices address the history of modern law. But above all, how do these two modes of representation, the visual and the legal, actually relate to one another? Murals and law have something in common—a belief in the force of walls. The Seven Crimes of Justice binds this common thematic together in a remarkable work that has to date attracted little critical attention. This essay gives it the attention it deserves, focusing on questions of time and memory, and of the relationship between the force of law and the force of art.