Draft

 

This is a very full retrospective of an artist I did not know but who was a peer of Matisse and Picasso.  The early works made by Lam at and shortly after art school in Havana reveal talent as he makes beautiful pencil portraits of himself and others.

 

Lam takes surrealism and cubism and marries it with voodoo in a brilliant conjunction of style and subject.  I thoroughly enjoy these primarily monochrome paintings -they are as strange and magical as any imagining of voodoo you might have.  He also paints Santeria, a Cuban religion not at all like voodoo but based on saints, five female saints are particularly important.  He paints the altars containing offerings to the saints in mottled multicoloured light. He paints in dark tones pointed elbows, bodies, boobs, bottoms, feet contorted every which way.  He paints his lover as a horse headed woman with tail and horns.

There are small ink and pastel drawings which are illustrative in style but lovely as any  Quentin Blake or other illustrator.  Here is a cat on the back of a dog that looks more like a dragon, elsewhere a giant caiman eats a trembling elephant and in another a horse carries a dog carries a cat carries a chicken on whose back is a turtle raised to the sun.  These are full of character and wit, could be in children’s book and maybe were intended for his children as for a while he lived in Italy while they lived with their mother and went to school in France.

Lam moves into printmaking and ceramics in later life as well as painting.  Some of his aquatint etchings were made to accompany the poetry of xxx and were made with the help of a master printmaker in Italy.  Rich brown blacks lie behind pared back figures in mainly line and white dance across the page.  They are striking and they achieve a glow not seen in his paintings.