Carmen Chami at National Museum of Mexican Art

 

 

 

If “Adlateres and the Unexpected Visit’’ ( The title piece of this exhibition - shown above ) is even slightly autobiographical, Carmen Chami is not especially happy about leaving Mexico. Immersed in iconic Mexican art, from the Baroque spirituality of Cristóbal de Villalpando (17th Century) to the surreal self dramatization of Frida Kahlo, she has neither the prankish humor nor the righteous social justice favored in Chicago.. And her work is visceral - the very opposite of the conceptual art still trending in university art departments. She paints, and presumably lives, entirely in a world of the spirit - a dark world illuminated by revelation rather than the sun. 

Zapata's Widows, as an Excuse

If her “intention is to make art that is completely universal" (as she asserts), then she is a spectacular failure - at least so far as this viewer is concerned. I have no idea, for example, what “Zapata’s widows as an excuse” is about - and there is no gallery text to explain it. What are those two, spread-eagled, interlocking young women doing? Is there some obscure legend about the wives of Emilio and his brother ? What about their behavior might serve as an excuse for anything? It hardly feels like a sexual interaction - It’s more like they are floating around in a dream - possibly their own. This painting is far more personal than universal.


Sadness, confusion, frustration, and anger seem to permeate the narratives in the show - but the vehicles that carry them are extraordinarily well made. Like the old masters, Chami composes figurative gesture simultaneous with graphic energy. So even when the subject is incomprehensible, the painting still feels so profound that the viewer is compelled to figure it out.

 

The Bad News

Her portraits, however,require no explanation, and there are several good ones - especially the self portrait titled “The Bad News”. Wow! What a painting! Possibly, for this artist, people do not exist except within intense moments of living. It’s the very opposite of treating the human body as still-life or clothes horse. Like Frida, she sees herself as suffering - inviting the viewer to share her most intimate moments. In her other great self portrait, the artist imagines herself as “Judith”, the Biblical heroine, who decapitates the enemy general who has taken her to bed. Grabbing her by the ankles, he is just about to drive home his point when - ooops - she cuts off his head with a handy sword. Our attention is drawn to the wild, cross eyed look that flashes across Chami’s (Judith’s) face. There are several great 17th century depictions of this gruesome scene - and Chami’s could hang right beside them.

Judith

As with Artemesia Gentileschi (a victim of rape) the exemplary story of Judith has served this artist well as a conflation of the deeply personal with the stridently political. Most of the other pieces, however, just have me admiring the artist’s virtuosity. “Incredulidad” (disbelief), presents a blind-folded woman touching the sternum of a reclining half naked man. It echoes Doubting Thomas when he touched the wounded chest of the resurrected Christ. The woman resembles the artist herself just as the man resembles the Holofernes mentioned above. But does this puzzling and apparently personal story really deserve such a luminous and complex pictorial space as well as the reference to sacred narrative? Where Frida’s self obsessions feel quirky - Chami’s feel ponderous.

Disbelief

The visual language of the 17th Century masters implies a universe of grand design and profound purpose. As applied in many of these paintings, that purpose is apparently to make humans miserable and there is certainly plenty of evidence from around the world to support such a belief.

 

 But you would have to be more depressed and fatalistic than I to accept it.

 

 

 

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Postscript:

 

My friend Misha Livshlultz has pointed out that there's no blood in Chami's version of Judith and Holofernes.  Not on the sword, not dripping from the head, not staining the sheets.  

One might conclude that the relationship here depicted is no more violent and abusive than the heterosexual act itself - which for some women might well be violent enough.