Kobena Mercer – Wifredo Lam’s Cross-Cultural Rhizomes

Wifredo Lam’s Cross-Cultural Rhizomes
by Kobena Mercer
is entirely without precedent in twentiethcentury
art. Throughout the period 1941 to
1952, when Wifredo Lam had travelled back
to Havana, we find a poetics of space in which
one’s eye is entranced by enigmatic picture
planes whose intense ambiguity arises from
their simultaneous flatness and openness.
Wifredo Lam
Anamu, 1942
Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
One feels joyfully disoriented in the
presence of The Jungle, 1943 (collection of The
Museum of Modern Art, New York). As various
anthropomorphic figures push forward from a
dense background of tropical vegetation, the
rhythmic pulsation of the vertical lines that
pull their elongated limbs upward unsettles
any figure/ground distinction to create
instead an “all over” composition in which
one’s eye begins to wander and roam. Before
the identity of the strange hybrid creatures
becomes an issue, one is already swept up
into an all-enveloping pictorial space that
Numerous North American painters
moved towards “all over” pictorial space by
passing through the gateway of abstraction
in the early 1940s, but in the Caribbean
journey that led to his mature style, Lam
activated a cross-cultural dialogue between
modernist painting and the ritual forms of
Afro-Cuban life by reworking the pictorial
resources of figuration completely. In such
works as Anamú, 1942 (collection of the
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,
Chicago), whose crescent moon face is
rendered in translucent browns and greens,
or the blue and white figuring of Femme, 1942
(Private Collection), where a horse-headed
woman emerges from a shimmering pink
haze, we notice incomplete edges in Lam’s
delineations of figure and ground. Such gaps
and pauses cut openings and passageways
that allow communicative flow among
different signifying systems otherwise closed
to one another in a colonial world dominated
by an either/or mentality of absolute
separation. To say that, with his return
to Cuba, the border-crossing practice of
hybridity comes to act as the core principle
of Lam’s artistic production -- moving
among multiple cultures so as to introduce
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