Lot Essay
During the 1940s Wifredo Lam moved away from the Cubist-inspired sobriety that characterized his work in the immediate years prior to his return to Cuba. In part, this movement followed Lam's developing interest in capturing visually the subject of metamorphosis. Metamorphosis became critical to Lam's way of thinking of the continuities and relations between the human, natural and spirit worlds, and led to the elaboration of two distinct forms of working. One was more painterly, reliant almost exclusively upon color, and the other was strongly graphic, based on notational drawings in oder to build a complex field of interconnecting forms through line.
Le Sacre properly belongs to the second group. The image is composed of a constantly mutating line that, in its movememnt upwards, transforms itself from an image of a horse to a winged animal to a bird, to horned figures emergent at the top. Each of these images represents a key figure in the world of the Afro-Cuban religion of Santería, and as such, Lam's increasing attention to creating a lexicon of visual forms that correspond to the religion.
In Le Sacre the complex image suggests a visual analogy to the transformatory state of possession and the occupation of the human and animal world and its merging into the natural and spirit world. Hence, Lam makes visible the presence of the orisha Eleggua, whose position at the top represents his eminence as the messenger spirit and the guardian of the crossroads of change.
As a singular composite image Lam gives visual form to the constitutive process of the sacred. No element can be separated, fusing one into another, the image of the sacred is embedded in the profane world of animal and humankind, as much as the profane is to be understood as belonging to the sacred.
Charles Merewether
Santa Monica, March 1995
Le Sacre properly belongs to the second group. The image is composed of a constantly mutating line that, in its movememnt upwards, transforms itself from an image of a horse to a winged animal to a bird, to horned figures emergent at the top. Each of these images represents a key figure in the world of the Afro-Cuban religion of Santería, and as such, Lam's increasing attention to creating a lexicon of visual forms that correspond to the religion.
In Le Sacre the complex image suggests a visual analogy to the transformatory state of possession and the occupation of the human and animal world and its merging into the natural and spirit world. Hence, Lam makes visible the presence of the orisha Eleggua, whose position at the top represents his eminence as the messenger spirit and the guardian of the crossroads of change.
As a singular composite image Lam gives visual form to the constitutive process of the sacred. No element can be separated, fusing one into another, the image of the sacred is embedded in the profane world of animal and humankind, as much as the profane is to be understood as belonging to the sacred.
Charles Merewether
Santa Monica, March 1995