Aimee Garcia Marrero

Good art can bewitch, bother, and bewilder. The Tempest by Italian Renaissance Master Giorgione is a prime example. Art historians down the centuries have tried (and mostly failed) to interpret this enigmatic image of a young wayfarer who encounters a nude woman breast-feeding a child while a thunderstorm breaks in the distance. In the early modern era, the Surrealists deliberately juxtaposed images in bizarre and unsettling ways, hoping to give voice to the unconscious by recreating the visual language of dreams. Cuban Artist Aimee Garcia Marrero, the creator of this untitled serigraph, can be considered a contemporary practitioner of the art of signs and symbols. She makes prints, paintings, and mixed media pieces of often ambigious meaning, rich in self-references and allusions to art-historical prototypes. Consider this print of a supine woman--a portrait of the artist--in a richly decorated room with a bird and floating flowers. At first glance, the position of the woman's body suggests a medieval effigy, the association with death underscored by the funereal floating lilies. But the tiny bird fluttering so suggestively above the recumbent female figure with its beak just above her mouth tilts the meaning in a different direction for me. This is a hummingbird, a species native to the Americas, revered by indigenous peoples as a messenger of the gods and a bringer of life. With this in mind, look again at the woman's hands. They are not folded across her chest as you would expect them to be placed on a corpse but appear to rest on her womb. Then, there is the deep blue of the figure's blouse, a color always associated with the Virgin Mary; the white lilies, a symbol of her purity. Even the gold embossed cloth of the backdrop brings to mind the brilliantly brocaded garments of angels in paintings of the late medieval Flemish masters, Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. Might this not be a surrealist variation on the traditional Annunciation scene--a mysterious image of the moment of conception? Whether you agree or not with my interpretation, Garcia Marrero has, certainly, created an arrestingly numinous picture, hinting at multiple levels of meanings. (John Kohan)