Lot Essay
From the period of his return to his homeland of Cuba in 1941 until the end of his life, Wifredo Lam became engaged in an exploration of Afro-Cuban religious culture. This entailed an artistic project of finding a visual correlative to the spirit world that remains a central component to the religious belief of the Yoruba based religion of Santera. In these terms, the title of his painting Los invitados may refer to those invited to a religious festive occasion or ceremony of initiation or the like.
After Cuba, Lam returned to live in Europe, while still, on occasion, returning to the Americas, especially Cuba. During this time, his painting became increasingly flatter and graphic in quality, leaving behind the dense painterly style of the mid-Forties. The composition was pared down, the color modulated and, with the introduction of a monochromatic ground, the relation between the figure and the ground was brought into closer proximity.
At the same time, Lam moved away from the human form that had so dominated his work in the early years, a move that, through the introduction of spirit as distinct from human figures, allows for a greater freedom from representational conventions. This, in turn, enables a greater fluidity of line and color to be introduced. Freed of representational constraints the figure, in his later work, becomes increasingly linear and attenuated in form.
This recalls the biomorphic character of figuration found in the work of his contemporary, the Chilean artist Roberto Matta. However, unlike Matta, these figures, as in Los invitados, dominate the space. They are not subject to the same laws that bind Matta's figures together as if the unwilling subject of nature's sacrificial violence. Rather, Lam's figures play out across the surface in a series of attitudes and gestures by which they interact with one another, overlapping, merging and mutating one into another.
This continues the element of metamorphosis that, as a way of visually suggesting the idea of spirit possession and power of spirits to change form, played a critical role in Lam's Afro-Cuban work of the 1940s. However, in the late work Lam's figures lose their immediate point of reference. The paintings are unencumbered by the symbols and trappings of place or context. They hover between the totemic and the pure play of formal abstraction. Isolating his figures into a flat fresco-like canvas, the images, as Lowery Sims has pointed out, unfold in continuous meandering lines across a shallow space.
In paintings, such as Los invitados, the line seems virtually distilled in its manner of representation. And it is here, perhaps, that we can see most clearly the presence of his own Chinese familial background with the almost calligraphic quality given to the form of notation. This calligraphic quality, apparent in some of Lam's early drawings, resurface most forcibly with his turn to printmaking during the 1950s. And from then on, we find this quality beginning to inform his painting, culminating in the late works of the Sixties and Seventies.
Dr. Charles Merewether
Los Angeles, April 1998
After Cuba, Lam returned to live in Europe, while still, on occasion, returning to the Americas, especially Cuba. During this time, his painting became increasingly flatter and graphic in quality, leaving behind the dense painterly style of the mid-Forties. The composition was pared down, the color modulated and, with the introduction of a monochromatic ground, the relation between the figure and the ground was brought into closer proximity.
At the same time, Lam moved away from the human form that had so dominated his work in the early years, a move that, through the introduction of spirit as distinct from human figures, allows for a greater freedom from representational conventions. This, in turn, enables a greater fluidity of line and color to be introduced. Freed of representational constraints the figure, in his later work, becomes increasingly linear and attenuated in form.
This recalls the biomorphic character of figuration found in the work of his contemporary, the Chilean artist Roberto Matta. However, unlike Matta, these figures, as in Los invitados, dominate the space. They are not subject to the same laws that bind Matta's figures together as if the unwilling subject of nature's sacrificial violence. Rather, Lam's figures play out across the surface in a series of attitudes and gestures by which they interact with one another, overlapping, merging and mutating one into another.
This continues the element of metamorphosis that, as a way of visually suggesting the idea of spirit possession and power of spirits to change form, played a critical role in Lam's Afro-Cuban work of the 1940s. However, in the late work Lam's figures lose their immediate point of reference. The paintings are unencumbered by the symbols and trappings of place or context. They hover between the totemic and the pure play of formal abstraction. Isolating his figures into a flat fresco-like canvas, the images, as Lowery Sims has pointed out, unfold in continuous meandering lines across a shallow space.
In paintings, such as Los invitados, the line seems virtually distilled in its manner of representation. And it is here, perhaps, that we can see most clearly the presence of his own Chinese familial background with the almost calligraphic quality given to the form of notation. This calligraphic quality, apparent in some of Lam's early drawings, resurface most forcibly with his turn to printmaking during the 1950s. And from then on, we find this quality beginning to inform his painting, culminating in the late works of the Sixties and Seventies.
Dr. Charles Merewether
Los Angeles, April 1998