Hispanic Women a Study in Contrast

by Margaret Hawkins

Although "La Mano Viva," the season opener at Gallery 312, features the work of three Hispanic women, the show is not particularly political along either gender lines or ethnic ones. The exhibit (which translated means "The Living Hand") does, however, showcase the vitality and diversity of three seasoned artists who work in markedly different styles.

Nereida Garcia-Ferraz is a Cuban exile whose family came to the United States in the '60s after Fidel Castro's takeover. At first glance her work has a Hispanic feel-if we accept the stereotype that colorful symbolism is characteristic of Hispanic work. After that, though, the stereotype begins to break down.

Garcia-Ferraz works in a kind of faux primitivism, much like Hollis Sigler. She combines a folk art naivete with an extremely sophisticated sense of design and color and blends all that with a rich personal system of symbols. Yes, the bright colors of Latin American art are here, but there is nothing truly primitive in Garcia-Ferraz' paintings. They reminded me more of French Fauvists such as France Marc than of Mexican folk artists.

Garcia-Ferraz combs through Cuban culture and history, as well as her own personal history for symbols and subjects. She comes up with a heady blend of the African, Spanish-Catholic and Chinese roots of Cuban culture. Then she mixes that with America in the '60s, resulting in a sweet, wild jumble of salsa and Jell-O. "The City at Night" explores a recurring motif in Garcia-Ferraz' work, that of the sleeping woman surrounded by vivid dream images. Here we see the sleeper in red pajamas dozing on a yellow and green hammock. All around her are urban and rural icons-a volcano, streetlights, two green horses, a structure that looks like a hotel or apartment building riding in a boat, cars, doors.

It is as if the sleeper is caught between two realities or two desires, presumably her Cuban homeland and the urban enticements of her new home in America.

What distinguishes this work from run-of-the-mill contemporary naive surrealism, though, is its glowing, super-saturated color palette. Garcia-Ferraz' paintings are not merely colorful; they appear to be drenched in color, on fire not only with reds and yellows but also with green and midnight blue. The whole image is restful yet alive.

Many of Garcia-Ferraz' paintings employ symmetry to structure the compositions, rendering them formal so they take on the weight of religious art. Symmetry gives us the feeling that something is being presented to us in a serious matter and we’d better pay attention.

"While June Passes By" is a compelling symmetrical image. Here the artist gives us four cows, cows absolutely shining in color, two yellow and two pink. The painting is divided into four quadrants, with the upper two cows apparently in milking stalls in daylight and the bottom two at night. The bodies of the latter cows give way to human figures below, as if humans are in fact inside the cows, dressed up as cows.

In counterpoint to Garcia-Ferraz' colorful surreal imagery is the nearly monochromatic and largely conceptual work of Mirentxu Ganzarain. She combines photographs with beeswax to build objects that comment philosophically on cycles in nature, time and apace.

If García Ferraz’s work is hot and emotional, Ganzarain’s is cool and cerebral. Although she was born in Chile, this artist strongly asserts that her work is not to be understood as ethnic.

The two pieces called "Mapping Paradox" are probably Ganzarain's strongest. They consist of two circles. In one, photographs of the artist in the process of making the beeswax piece are embedded at regular intervals in the wax. The other is a drawing of a circle on the wall composed of many sketchy arcs made by the artist by using her own body as a compass.

For all the apparent minimalism of Ganzarain'e work, at least in the company of two intensely colorful painters, her use of beeswax belies a basic sensuality. To make a sculptural circle out of the stuff is an inspiration, for the material itself suggests the fundamentals of creation, like clay but cleaner and brighter. The small photographs embedded in the wax alternate between images of the wall drawing and silhouettes of the artist in expressive dance-like poses making the drawing with her body.

The third artist in this exhibit is Santa Barraza, an artist of Mexican descent from Texas. Her work embraces the conventions and themes of Hispanic art, blending them with her own iconography to revitalize a tradition. By combining sacred hearts and representations of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe with modern elements and then placing them in hammered tin frames that recall the retablo formal. Barraza asserts the reality of myths and legends.

" Lupe of Texas" shows an apparition of Mary appearing in the maguey plant, a fleshy, succulent native of the· Southwest. The Virgin appears sweetly among the plant's prickly leaves, while behind her we see longhorn cattle and oil wells. By combining the sacred with the modern, Barraza casts the dilemma of contemporary Chicanos into high relief – what would have happened if the Virgin appeared in J.R. Ewing territory?

Margaret Hawkins is a Chicago free-lance writer