Bridging Continents: Connecting African and Latin American Art
The surrealistic image of a sleeper in Alberto Donat’s La siesta has an almost classical balance: dark lines on the left are matched by similar lines on the right; there are red areas above and below the figure. A modest Kuba textile from Zaire, exhibited below Donat’s painting, has only simple geometric designs, but the two that are visible in this folded cloth are very different from each other. One has two mazes, each a dead end, while the other is a maze with a single pathway and many entrances and exits. The nonrecurring forms found in this and the other Kuba textiles in the show are quietly ecstatic in effect–the longer one looks, the more diverse the shapes become.
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The wildly patterned paintings of Santeria deities by Cuban-born New Yorker Luis Molina look a bit cartoonish at first, but they’re subtler than they seem. The elaborate geometric designs surrounding the central figures seem to emanate from the feather patterns of one or more birds also depicted. The interchangeability of human and animal forms is a key feature of much African art; here the subtly modulated colors create a continuum between human figures, nature, and abstraction, while the swirling patterns give the figures some of the odd, almost radiant energy of African sculptures.
In his series of paintings “The Shadow of the Body,” five of which are presented here, silhouettes of figures are covered with patterns taken from nature: dense skeins of leaves and an occasional open-jawed beast. But some of the figures are set against deep black backgrounds; a few are themselves solid black. These black areas don’t blend in smoothly with the design, but stand out from it, almost as if each picture had two different levels: nature’s beings and a realm of primal shadows, unknown and unknowable forms. The viewer is drawn both to creatures that are richly patterned accretions of forest and jungle and to dark shapes that seem to carry unseen powers. The atavistic worship of the unknown that’s buried in us all is here combined with a vision of humans drawn from, and stitched beautifully into, nature’s weave.
