Beauty, adrift in metaphors

Yet all that beauty has a fevered, hallucinatory quality that ultimately feels unanchored.

González Palma, born and raised in Guatemala and now living in Argentina, is one of Latin America’s most recognized fine art photographers. He is best known for portraits of indigenous people in his native country. Those images wrestle with issues of colonialism and power. His subjects gaze directly at the camera, claiming their humanity.

His works at AIB’s Main Gallery include several titled by the Argentinean poet Graciela de Oliveira. Many of these have no people in them at all; furniture stands in for the absent body, mysteriously crossing boundaries. In “Su Mano Vacila y me Roza (His Hand Vacillates and Touches Me),’’ the outer edges of two straight-backed chairs twine together, as if arm in arm, in an empty wood-paneled room. This series is all on gold leaf over red paper, tones that recall altarpieces and imbue the works with the suggestion of the sacred. Empty of people, they are haunting.

When people show up, though, González Palma forces his metaphors: In the diptych “Las Sombras de su Niñez (The Shadows of His Youth)’’ a young man sits across a scuffed table from a skull in a party hat. The man looks away, but of course, death is undeniable.

The “Jerarquías de Intimidad la Anunciación’’ series takes off from the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel’s revelation to the Virgin Mary that she would give birth to the Son of God. In many of these color digital prints, hands appear out of nowhere, touching people and gesturing. “Variación #6’’ has a cupped hand beneath the chin of a man in a red shirt and black jacket; his eyes are closed, his face turned up and bathed in light.

Unlike during the Renaissance, when religious imagery was one of art’s great currencies, it’s difficult today to portray religious experience in a manner that doesn’t seem trite or hokey. All the hands floating around these works don’t evoke a comforting presence so much as a prop from a low-grade horror movie.

González Palma deploys hands more effectively in the University Hall Gallery at Porter Exchange, where the artist isolates and re-creates images of hands from paintings of the Annunciation by Renaissance and Baroque artists such as Botticelli and Guido Reni. The hands, gesticulating or in prayer, hover on that gold-and-red ground in circular formats, arranged in groups of three or four. Unlike the muddier, more narrative series about the Annunciation in the other gallery, these images are stark and effectively tie historical references and religious experience into a smart, contemporary presentation.

The final body of work at the University Hall Gallery echoes González Palma’s early portraits of Guatemalans. These are hand-painted silver prints, each a sepia-tinted, head-and-shoulders portrait of a woman. All but one looks directly into the camera. Again, these are exquisitely made, and the women are all beautiful. If González Palma’s strategy here is to take back the power for women long subjugated and objectified by the artist’s gaze, he doesn’t quite succeed, because the works are simply too beautiful; they prompt covetousness.

Sheer beauty inevitably represents and stirs passion and desire. The relationship of desire to power, whether personal, political, or spiritual, is González Palma’s rich territory. The problem is that as he dissects that desire, he also feeds it, and so there’s no escape, and no perspective.

In short, viewing art is not a static experience, it’s part of the art’s performance. And viewing Ireland’s wall drawings is, indeed, not static. I didn’t see them at all when I stepped into the gallery. He has smudged large-scale graphite portraits of occult writer Sylvan J. Muldoon on the walls, and they are nearly invisible. The process of perceiving them is like seeing someone approaching through a thick fog; you know there’s something there, but it takes a few moments before it coalesces into a familiar form.

Muldoon wrote a book about astral projection, and the drawings can be seen as an evocation of an out-of-body experience; they are there, but almost not there. The installation includes a small table with text Muldoon wrote about his occult experiences. It’s a simple, straightforward project, but clever in the way it prods the viewer’s perceptions.