Cristina ante las sombras y la luz

“The fact is that Leonora epitomizes the woman of our latter-day Renaissance,” wrote her friend and noted Surrealist patron Edward James. “Are the young not feeling their way toward a fresher world of the imagination? A reviving appetite for fantasy and magic is suggested by a new interest in witchcraft” (intro. to Leonora Carrington: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat., Center for Inter-American Relations, New York, 1976, p. 20). A modern-day Renaissance woman and a would-be witch, Carrington grew up in the waning years of Britain’s Occult Revival, which had stirred interest in esoterica across a long nineteenth century, from the Romantics through the fin-de-siècle. Nurtured on fairy tales and Celtic lore as a child by her Irish mother and nanny, she explored themes of enchantment and transformation across a venerable career, her paintings inculcating a reality at once magical and miraculous. Finding a parallel between the hybrid Celtic Catholicism of her youth and the syncretic religious practices of Mexico, her adopted home beginning in 1942, Carrington pondered painting as an alchemical practice, merging Mexico’s ritual traditions and history—the Popol Vuh, pre-Hispanic archaeology, herbs and foodstuffs sourced from local markets—with a host of divinatory arts, from Tarot and astrology to the I Ching and the Cabbala. In this exercise she was joined by a number of kindred spirits, among them the photographer Kati Horna, the painter Remedios Varo, and the artist Cristina Bremer, the subject of the present painting.

“[Carrington’s] desire to convey to women her message of reappropriating their powers is a constant throughout her painting and writing,” notes art historian Tere Arcq, “not only through the representation of the goddesses of ancestral cultures, but also through those of real women who possessed visionary qualities” (“The Mystery of the White Goddess,” in Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales, exh. cat., Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, 2018, p. 187). Her inspired subjects include Mother Theresa (Santa Teresa en la cocina, 1958) and Mary the Jewess, the first female alchemist (Chrysopeia of Mary the Jewess, 1964). A rare contemporary portrait within Carrington’s oeuvre, Cristina ante las sombras y la luz features the Mexican-born writer and painter who was a frequent visitor in her home during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Known as “La Bruja,” Bremer shared Carrington’s fascination with the arcane, compiling her wisdom in La magia de la bruja Bremer (1992) and La nueva magia de la bruja Bremer (1998), full of alchemical recipes and potions as well as interpretations of dreams and symbols. As an artist, she exhibited in Mexico, the United States, and England, and her paintings from this period can be characterized as stark compositions that bring to mind figure-ground reversals.

In Cristina ante las sombras y la luz, Carrington depicts her friend in her trademark black, floor-length tunic, placing her at the center of a claustrophobic space with her back toward the viewer in a parody of one of Bremer’s own paintings. She sits alone and pensive in an otherwise empty, opalescent room, a mysterious light casting shadows through an open door. In 1969, Carrington described Bremer and her art with characteristically cryptic words:

The mask = the wheel of fortune
The double = the lovers
The I = Temperance, an angel
Cristina’s unknown choice, The Wall.

She presents her mystery in the form of a wall and we ask ourselves what or whom she is hiding. At times, she allows us to decry this mystery—a clean sky, an unknown entity—like a strange morning, in which midday breaks through to reveal another dimension. She knows herself, what she knows, what she does not yet know.

Searching, she invites us to a discovery (Salomon Grimberg, 1995).

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park