CATALOGUE ESSAYS

Teresa Serrano: In the Presence of Absence

in Teresa Serrano, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico, 2017

by Raphael Rubinstein

Teresa Serrano claimed her artistic identity, began to articulate it, not in her native Mexico, but in New York City.  Many artists before and since have found that geographical and cultural displacement can be liberating, whether it is simply a matter of escaping from the oppressive society of a small town to the welcoming anonymity of a big city or of journeying across an ocean to a land where nothing is familiar, from food to cuisine to religion. Early during her time in New York, Serrano obsessively walked throughout the streets of the city, taking in the life and architecture of her new home. This experience is recalled in a 1990 painting titled The Island, where Manhattan is littered with bluish-gray strips inspired by how the buildings along Manhattan’s streets frame slivers of sky. It’s important to note that when Serrano moved from Mexico City to New York City in the early 1980s she was beginning her career not as a student fresh out of art school but as a woman who had unexpectedly discovered her creative powers and artistic ambition after years of marriage and child-raising. In this, Serrano must be seen as part of the wave of women artists who were empowered by the Feminist movement to reject the traditional social roles that stood in the way of their artistic progress.

Starting an artistic career is never easy, whatever your age and wherever you happen to be. As a Latin American artist in New York in the early 1980s, Serrano faced the additional challenge of negotiating a downtown artworld that was still culturally and ethnically insular. Among the stories Serrano tells from her early experiences in New York is one about a gallery owner who was enthusiastic about Serrano’s paintings and planning to exhibit them until the moment when she learned that the artist was not Spanish, as she had thought, but Mexican. “We don’t show Mexicans,” the SoHo dealer crudely explained, directing Serrano to another gallery uptown that specialized in Mexican art. Happily, things have changed enormously in the New York art world (and the dealer in question long ago closed her gallery), but this anecdote suggests the kind of resistance Serrano encountered. This story also reminds us of an important fact about her paintings and drawings—that they rarely display imagery which is immediately recognizable as Mexican. This is in dramatic contrast with much of the new art that was coming out of Mexican in the 1980s under the label of “Neo-Mexicanism.” As art historian Rubén Gallo explains:

The Neo–Mexican painters, including the well–known figures of Nahúm Zenil, Julio Galán and Dulce María Núñez, wanted to use art to affirm and celebrate the Mexican identity. Not only were their enormous canvases crammed with all sorts of objects, foodstuffs and places that can be considered symbols of the Mexican soul –– bleeding hearts, the Virgin of Guadalupe, chili peppers and nopales, crosses and crucifixes, mountains and volcanoes, bull fighters and charro outfits –– but also they sought to construct a transhistoric myth of “Mexicanness” by defining a continuous thread running through the national culture from the pre–Columbian period through today.

Only a few of Serrano’s paintings include specifically Mexican imagery, and even in those cases the motifs she chooses tend to be understated in their Mexicanness.  For instance, in 10a Estación, a large mixed-media work from 1990 that is part of a series depicting the Stations of the Cross, Serrano has incorporated an actual rebozo into the composition. While the rebozo—a patterned fabric worn as a shawl or scarf and traditionally used for carrying infants and foodstuffs—is typically Mexican, it is not usually an instantly recognizable sign of Mexican identity.  Serrano is thus not employing it as a folkloric image, but as a symbol at once personal and universal of the emotional content she wishes to express through her work. The iconographic sources are perhaps more emphatically Mexican in her works inspired by tzompantli, the walls of skulls found in the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza. Serrano evokes these altars in the gridded skulls of Tzompantli (1992) and in Tzompantli I (1989) where the simultaneous presence of candles and skulls evokes the Mexican melding of pre-Columbian and Catholic funerary rituals.

But if Serrano was not interested in establishing her national identity at the outset of her career, this does not mean that she embraced some kind of uninflected international style. For one thing, her frequent use of Spanish text in her paintings and drawings was an explicit marker, especially in the context of New York, of linguistic and cultural difference from the predominantly Anglophone art world.  

The majority of Serrano’s texts are derived from poets and novelists.  In 1991, for instance, she made a pair of paintings emblazoned with lines from Federico García Lorca’s famous “A las cinco de la tarde” poem about bullfighting (although a tradition of bullfighting exists in Mexico, it does not signal Mexicanness).  Across the large canvases she prints the title of the poem repeated edge to edge and top to bottom in a black sans serif font. Over this wall of text Serrano paints a bullighter’s cape (in one painting it’s crimson red, in another several shades of violet). These vividly colored fabrics swirl and fold like the drapery in Baroque-era paintings and sculptures, but in some areas they are transparent, allowing the lines of García Lorca’s poem to penetrate through. A similar text-ground underlies two 1992 paintings in which Serrano borrows the motif of a flowing dress from Francsico de Zurbarán’s painting The Entombment of Saint Catherine.  Eliminating all the figures from the original, Serrano repositions the martyr’s dress (in the process changing its color from pink to white) and adds an urn and a brown-skinned hand in the act of placing flowers in the urn. The underlying text—“I want to be buried as my ancestors in the dark, cool womb of a clay vase”—comes from a Peruvian song. With its Andean music, its urn of pre-Columbian design and its brown hand (signifying indigenous identity), the painting reveals itself not as a simple homage to a great Spanish painter but as an allegory of post-colonial cultural realignment.

Motifs from paintings like these and others are reworked in some of Serrano’s sculptures from the early 1990s, including a series of roselike painted plaster wall reliefs and a group of challenging steel-mirror-plaster works. In the numerous drawings Serrano made as she was developing her sculptures one can trace how she traveled fluidly from two-dimensional to three-dimensional work. Particularly outstanding are some brightly painted and carefully annotated sketches that show her working out details of her freestanding embroidered-fabric sculptures from the “Rivers,” “Mountains” and “Fertility Goddess” series.

A different kind of politics animates A Buendía (1989), which pays tribute to Manuel Buendía (1926-1984), a crusading Mexican journalist and poet whose assassination was pinned on corrupt elements in Mexico’s secret police. Serrano was profoundly moved by his death. Her memorializing painting quotes a phrase by Buendía: “No permitas que me tenga lastima aspiro al relampago mortal que inmobiliza al hombre en el instante supremo del amor” (Don’t allow me to feel pity for myself. I aspire to the mortal lightning that immobilizes men in the supreme instant of love). This poetic credo is taken from his last column, written a week before he was murdered. Serrano stencils it in red, white and green letters (the colors of the Mexican flag) against an abraded green-yellow ground strewn with images of dried flowers, grit, dust and what looks like a shroud. The canvas, which is prophetic of the terrible violence that has since enveloped Mexico, is pierced by three bullet holes, representing the three shots that killed Buendía.

Not all Serrano’s texts are in Spanish. An encounter with the New York poet David Shapiro resulted in several works that belong to the genre of the “poem painting.” The painting First the sun, then the moon, then the earth” (1989) features lines from Shapiro’s long poem “After a Lost Original,” specifically a section titled “For Victims.”

They have used the bodies of children

As improvised bridges,

which they later cross.

First the sun and the moon,

Then the earth comes in.

But they have lost

The atmosphere, which belongs to them.

On a linen the color of an animal hide or a dust-filled sky, Serrano handwrites Shapiro’s verses over three bone-like patches of white. Declining to illustrate the poem with literal images, she instead seeks visual and emotional equivalents in the form of several red flowers embedded in a smoke-like cloud and a large skull drawn with charcoal. 

Transparency recurs throughout Serrano’s paintings and drawings of the late 1980s and early 1990s, from the capes in the García Lorca paintings to the diaphanous flower in El Petate (1989) to a coffin-like see-through box in The Falling Year (1990) to some pieces of white embroidery affixed to Simón ayudando a Jesús. There is hardly a single work that does not include some object the artist has chosen to render as though it were made of glass or air. But as the viewer begins to notice the prevalence of transparent images, a deeper and even more pervasive transparency makes itself felt. The grounds of the paintings and drawings are never flat or closed off—instead, Serrano creates porous fields of color and marks out of which some images seem to emerge while others sink toward the depths of her mottled grounds. Within this floating world nothing is stable, nothing is fixed, and yet no mark or sign is ever wholly lost. Her works resemble palimpsests, antique manuscripts where the traces of past inscriptions survive in fragmentary form and become the grounds for new traces to be laid down. Art historians use the term pentimento (from the Italian verb pentirsi, to repent) to describe the appearance in a finished painting of marks made in an earlier state. (The presence of pentimenti can be evidence that a work is probably by the original artist rather than being the product of a workshop assistant.) As the definition of what constitutes a “finished” picture has changed over the last century, many painters have allowed signs of their process to remain visible, but few artists have embraced the pentimento as enthusiastically as Serrano. I’m thinking, in particular, of works such as Windows 1-3 (1990), a series of three gouache and tempera on linen paintings in which every mark, every smudge of color, every half-erased letter created during the process of making have remained equally present in the final version: separate moments of time have been compressed into the fluttering space of the painting. (Serrano continued to explore the theme of windows in photo collages on cardboard.)

Serrano found a similar compression and fluidity of time in Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which inspired a painting that takes the forms of a fanciful census: across the canvas Serrano inscribes the names of characters from Garcia Marquez’s multi-generational novel. At first, not recognizing the literary reference, one might think that Serrano was naming members of her own family. By contrast, the title of another mixed-media painting, Don Julio’s Handkerchief (1988), initially sounds like an excursion into painterly fiction. In fact, “Don Julio” was the artist’s father and she collaged one of his actual handkerchiefs onto the painting, which features images of votive candles and flowers within a patchy field of coppery and earthen colors. 

It takes some time to notice a strange absence in nearly all of Serrano’s paintings and drawings: the human body. The artist depicts countless varieties of flowers, different kinds of draped fabrics, vases, trees, warring roosters, but almost never a human figure.  The roosters appear in a series of drawings inspired by cockfights. Done with graphite, charcoal and acrylic paint on vertically elongated sheets of paper, works such as Ki-Ki Ri-Ki (1991) and Sangría (1991) employ empty space in the manner of Chinese landscape painting. Surrounded by elegant voids, the aggressive, often bloodied roosters seem to transcend the cruelty of their circumstances.

Among the rare exceptions to her unwritten rule of “no human figures” is the biblical-inspired painting Simón ayudando a Jesús (1990), where Serrano sketches two pair of bare legs in an old masterish style while leaving the rest of the bodies undefined and a 1993 series of narrative paintings on small cardboard boxes.  It is tempting to say that the flowers in the paintings are surrogates for human figures but this would be to ignore their essentially symbolic nature.  Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the flowers and other motifs in her paintings and drawings evoke human figures that have just left the room. There are no figures in Serrano’s paintings because they have gone somewhere else, leaving behind them these relics, these traces, these offerings—it is no accident that Serrano titled one of her shows “Ofrendas.” (Offerings).

The absences in Serrano’s pictorial works are, in part, influenced by her childhood in a family where many members died young (most traumatically the artist’s mother), and where lengthy separation was a recurring condition. As Serrano shifted her attention in the early 1990s from painting to sculpture, the human figure remained missing. (To date, Serrano’s career has unfolded in three phases. In the first, which is the subject of this essay, she focused on paintings and drawings. The second, covering most of the 1990s, saw her turn her attention to sculpture. During the last decade, she has been making films and videos.) By contrast, the videos that Serrano has been creating over the last decade are full of human figures, usually women. For each of the mediums that has engaged her, Serrano has developed a new iconography, a new perspective from which to view her own life, as a woman, as an artist, as someone equally formed by her experiences in Mexico and New York. Because painting is so concrete and immediate, it can seem to be dealing with pure presence, with what it presents to our eyes. Teresa Serrano’s paintings remind us, however, that the medium is also grappling with what remains invisible, with the irremediable absences that are enclosed by its vivid presence.