Latin American artists given their due in shows

By Christine Temin, Globe Staff, 10/22/2003

It's not just Frida and Diego anymore. Latin American art has become hot because it's also become cool. Boston, generally a frigid clime for contemporary art of any temperature, is smitten with Central and South American modern and contemporary art, thanks to a confluence of favorable factors.

The most recent manifestations of this are two exhibitions in spaces a bit off the usual gallery/museum route. At the Starr Gallery at the Jewish Community Center in Newton, "An Architecture of Memory: Eight Jewish Argentinean Artists" features artists all but unknown in this country, artists whose work is rigorous and intellectual. Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies is hosting "Code-Switcher," a solo show by Rosalia Bermudez, a young Uruguayan now living in New York.

There's a local context for these shows. The Institute of Contemporary Art has exhibited a significant amount of Latin American art, and will again with curator Gilbert Vicario's show of new Mexican work early in 2004. The Massachusetts College of Art has staged more than half a dozen exhibitions of Cuban art. Two years ago Harvard's Fogg Art Museum presented a major exhibition, "Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art From the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection," which swept away any lingering stereotypes about unbridled expressionism and passionate politics in art made anywhere south of Miami.

Boston also boasts serious collectors of modern and contemporary Latin American art. John Axelrod and Kenneth Freed are probably the two most committed to the field.

Both the JCC and the Rockefeller Center shows have strong political content -- but nothing like the blatant propaganda murals of Diego Rivera and his peers. This contemporary work is subtle, more elusive. With Rivera you get the conquistadores bringing syphilis and the Inquisition to the New World. With Bermudez you get disembodied wax mouths turning up in the Center's conference rooms and staircase, as if trying to speak. (The Center doesn't yet have a real gallery space, and it's something of a scavenger hunt to find the works in this show.)

The title "Code-Switcher" refers to the practice of shifting between languages. In this case it alludes to the displacement and even disappearance of Uruguayans, and the fractured lives of people who don't "belong" anywhere. Many of these pieces are purposely difficult to see: the almost invisible Plexiglas dots climbing the stairwell, for instance, asking to be "read" through touch; the white paper diptych called "Maps," embossed with images of a human heart, its parts labeled as in a medical text, and the words "welcome home," but with no indication of where home is.

In a couple of instances, Bermudez's work resembles that of Christian Boltanski, whose trademark is grainy black and white photos of Holocaust victims harshly illuminated by bare light bulbs. Her equivalent of those cruel bulbs is nasty, twisted metal clamps that imprison images of helpless, unidentified people. In one piece, she lines up 100 dog tags, identification separated from subjects who are among the "disappeared." In "Ghosts: A Family Portrait," Bermudez silkscreens faces onto tulle and frames them with embroidery hoops. The fogginess of the tulle contributes to the apparition effect, while the embroidery hoops allude to a cozy domesticity that is sorely absent. The pieces are suspended from the ceiling, as if suspended in time and place as well: They are nowhere.

"Nowhere" is one of the themes of Rut Rubinson's "A Valise, A Trip Series," part of the "Architecture of Memory" show at the JCC. The exhibition is tied to the Argentinean Jewish Relief Campaign, founded in Boston last winter to help the tens of thousands of Jews in that country now living in desperate straits beneath the poverty line.

Rubinson's piece is a quartet of small boxes with tiny artifacts inside. In one is a minute figure of a woman with suitcases beside her, facing away from us and into a black void. Her life is utterly up in the air, as is the heap of valises in a stuck elevator in another part of the piece.

One of several impressive aspects of this show -- the most ambitious and adventurous I've seen in this space -- is that while all the artists deal with both architecture and memory, their work is dramatically different in style and media.

Leonardo Gotleyb makes stark, black and white woodcuts of terrifying architecture. These nightmare complexes, held together with giant hooks and heavy ropes, look as if they could swallow a nearly infinite number of inhabitants who might never be seen again.

Silvana Blasbaig is the show's other printmaker, but her woodcut monoprints are as ethereal as Gotleyb's work is blunt. Butterflies and fish, creatures of the sky and sea, are seen from above, as if lying on some scientist's examining table, awaiting classification.

Laura Murlender, Silvia Brewsa, Carlos Kravetz, and Viviana Zargon are all painters -- each with a distinct voice. Murlender turns the grid, that staple of contemporary art, into a statement about wiping out what's happened, through a crust of white laid over darker tones.

Against gorgeous, painterly abstract backgrounds Brewsa sets tiny figures and a symbol language resembling hieroglyphs. The largest of her works in this show, "Once Upon a Time," is divided by vertical lines, to which the figures cling. It's hard to tell whether they're holding on for dear life or practicing acrobatic stunts. The picture is all the stronger for the ambiguity.

Like Brewsa's, Kravetz's big, bright, spattered canvases have a decorative aspect. The imagery in his "Construction Detail" includes a skeletal archway centered by a pillar -- phantom architecture. Over it is a rectangle of woven-patterned gold leaf, with a silver egg-shape sliced into three parts, an iconographic enigma.

Zargon is the most daring of the painters. Her monochromatic canvases feature machines, text and numbers. There's something very didactic and blunt about these industrial-strength works. Her "Chelsea" is a long, narrow vertical slice of a black and white street scene punctuated by fire escapes, with surreal rectangular shadows falling on the street. The stainless steel square glommed onto the upper right of the canvas seems like one of those shadows taken away and made tough and tangible.

Mariana Schapiro's "Labyrinths" are carved wooden reliefs painted the shimmering black of crushed coal. They spiral inward: You see the shape from above, a viewpoint that poses no threat. People inside it, though, might feel in the grip of a claustrophobic maze. Or maybe not -- the circling forms could also be focal points for meditation. The duality here and in other works in the show accounts for a good part of its power.

Christine Temin's Perspectives column runs Wednesdays.

Code-Switcher: An Installation by Rosalia Bermudez

At: the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 61 Kirkland St., Harvard University, Cambridge, through Jan. 15; Call 617-495-3366.

An Architecture of Memory: Eight Jewish Argentinean Artists

At: the Starr Gallery, Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center, 333 Nahanton St., Newton, through Nov. 17; Call 617-558-6485.