拍品專文
Wifredo Lam returned to his native land of Cuba in 1942 after some twenty years away in Europe. It was a momentous occasion and over the next eight years he lay the foundations of modern Afro-Cuban painting.
Alongside his Cuban contemporaries in literature and music, he sought to render "el monte" or "la selva" as the birthplace of their ancestral spirits and the place of their birth and origin. For Lam, Afro-Cuban religion, notably Santería and Palo Monte, were the carriers of a historical memory of a displaced comunity, At its heart the spirit world embodied both the historical violence and the dreams of transformation of the Afro-Cuban people.
Through mimesis Lam subjected European models to the ancestral spirits of Afro-Cuban culture. Lam's work forms a counter-narrative to the dominant neo-colonial discourse of modernist primitivism. There is always in Lam a double coding, a bifurcation of language that allows multiple readings, innocent and complicit, a kind of savage beauty. It is an articulation of exchange and transformation between two worlds, two cultures, Western and non-Western, the secular and sacred world of Afro-Cuban culture.
In the early paintings after his return to Cuba, Lam continued his interest in the representation of woman, but now in close association with the image of the horse, birds and nature. Lam reconfigures the modernist idea of poetic metamorphosis to register the dual realities of someone taken out of herself, as of someone possessed. The painting Femme asisse avec fleurs, in which the body of the woman transforms into a horse, makes specific reference to he use of caballo (horse) to signify a practicante who is possessed by an orisha or deity of Santería. And by giving to the seated woman the flowers and bathing the image in a golden light, suggests an intoxicating fusion between the human, spiritual and natural worlds. As in Western modernism woman remains Lam's principal subject, but with a difference. They become possessed by the spirits and serve as guardians and keepers of the faith.
By the mid-forties, Lam's paintings became increasingly filled by fields of dazziling light and dissolving forms. Into this he introcuded images of birds appearing momentarily in their flight across landscapes of dense foliage or empty skies. With their long beaks, myriad eyes and horns, they are composite figures of the orisha figure of Eshu, messenger of the gods, the guardian of the crossroads, sacred forests and birds who, in Santería , represent "ashe" or the divine life force of the orishas. Their appearence augurs the advent of change, a propitious moment. And for the next thirty years and more of his work, Lam sustained this image as his single most powerful emblem of Afro-Cuban culture. As if mindful of such works as Butinantes of 1945 and their symbolic meaning in the context of Cuba, Lam wrote in 1951: "What is so curious is that these dramas so close to us seem like distant apparitions...knives...become in turn vigilant, disquieting, ready to open mortal wounds. Wings of evasion, omens of birds in flight skimming the surface of our eyes in contemplation of their fleeing, their exodus, like tongues of fire in anxious infinity."
Charles Merewether
New York, March, 1994
Alongside his Cuban contemporaries in literature and music, he sought to render "el monte" or "la selva" as the birthplace of their ancestral spirits and the place of their birth and origin. For Lam, Afro-Cuban religion, notably Santería and Palo Monte, were the carriers of a historical memory of a displaced comunity, At its heart the spirit world embodied both the historical violence and the dreams of transformation of the Afro-Cuban people.
Through mimesis Lam subjected European models to the ancestral spirits of Afro-Cuban culture. Lam's work forms a counter-narrative to the dominant neo-colonial discourse of modernist primitivism. There is always in Lam a double coding, a bifurcation of language that allows multiple readings, innocent and complicit, a kind of savage beauty. It is an articulation of exchange and transformation between two worlds, two cultures, Western and non-Western, the secular and sacred world of Afro-Cuban culture.
In the early paintings after his return to Cuba, Lam continued his interest in the representation of woman, but now in close association with the image of the horse, birds and nature. Lam reconfigures the modernist idea of poetic metamorphosis to register the dual realities of someone taken out of herself, as of someone possessed. The painting Femme asisse avec fleurs, in which the body of the woman transforms into a horse, makes specific reference to he use of caballo (horse) to signify a practicante who is possessed by an orisha or deity of Santería. And by giving to the seated woman the flowers and bathing the image in a golden light, suggests an intoxicating fusion between the human, spiritual and natural worlds. As in Western modernism woman remains Lam's principal subject, but with a difference. They become possessed by the spirits and serve as guardians and keepers of the faith.
By the mid-forties, Lam's paintings became increasingly filled by fields of dazziling light and dissolving forms. Into this he introcuded images of birds appearing momentarily in their flight across landscapes of dense foliage or empty skies. With their long beaks, myriad eyes and horns, they are composite figures of the orisha figure of Eshu, messenger of the gods, the guardian of the crossroads, sacred forests and birds who, in Santería , represent "ashe" or the divine life force of the orishas. Their appearence augurs the advent of change, a propitious moment. And for the next thirty years and more of his work, Lam sustained this image as his single most powerful emblem of Afro-Cuban culture. As if mindful of such works as Butinantes of 1945 and their symbolic meaning in the context of Cuba, Lam wrote in 1951: "What is so curious is that these dramas so close to us seem like distant apparitions...knives...become in turn vigilant, disquieting, ready to open mortal wounds. Wings of evasion, omens of birds in flight skimming the surface of our eyes in contemplation of their fleeing, their exodus, like tongues of fire in anxious infinity."
Charles Merewether
New York, March, 1994