“This woman doesn’t paint // so we can say: ‘What strange things // spout from thi
“This woman doesn’t paint // so we can say: ‘What strange things // spout from this artist’s head!’ // This woman has enormous eyes. // With those eyes any woman could // disfigure the world if she wanted to.”Heberto Padilla wrote these words in a 1968 poem about Antonia Eiríz. With modest pathos, Padilla comes close to achieving the impossible: capturing in words the brutal magic that courses through Eiríz’s paintings. Rendered with visceral figuration, the demons in her work evoke the horrors of war, like torture, incarceration, chemical weapons, and genocide. Working as she was in the aftermath of WWII—as well as Cuba’s own transition from a capitalist dictatorship to a communist one in the 1950s and 60s—Eiríz denies a direct political commentary in favor of a more universal one. Their “faces that spring as if from under a blow,” as Padilla describes. “Those twisted lips // not even mercifully covered by a blot, // those strokes that appear suddenly // like roguish old ladies.” Eiríz reminds me of the disturbing ferocity of Francisco Goya’s famous Black Paintings, in particular his image of Saturn Devouring His Son from 1819. At the same time she calls to mind her American contemporary Leon Golub, who pioneered his own form of grotesque figuration at a time when most New York artists were embracing purist abstraction. One of my favorite artists of all time, Golub manifested a material metaphor in his paintings between the brutalized, scorched, and abraded canvas and brown bodies subjected to violence under American imperialism. Thinking of Eiríz in this context, we come closer to understanding her embrace of figuration as all the bolder and more emphatic.Antonia Eiríz, Untitled, 1990s -- source link