Ghost of Frida Kahlo Haunts Show

TIJUANA — In 1988, La Jolla’s Iturralde Gallery (then La Casa del Arte) showed a series of lithographs by Lucia Maya that were inspired by the extraordinarily prolific and passionate life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Maya’s affinity for Kahlo’s precise, naturalistic style of rendering and her symbolic, surreal imagery made the series as much a dialogue between kindred spirits as a homage to a legendary life.

This month, an extensive selection of Maya’s paintings, prints and drawings can be seen at the Centro Cultural Tijuana in a show titled “Umbral de las Transfiguraciones” (Threshold of Transfigurations). Though Kahlo’s striking visage is nowhere to be found here, her pointed, poignant approach is present throughout.

Maya, who was born on Catalina Island and now lives in Guadalajara, never musters the same blend of toughness and vulnerability that makes Kahlo’s work so singularly intriguing. Her intent, though, differs substantially. The mood she consistently creates is less intimate and revealing than Kahlo’s and, instead, feels like a melange of received styles: saccharine sweetness, Gothic horror and surreal poetry.

Maya’s debt to the heritage of surrealism runs the deepest, especially in her use of familiar forms such as the human heart, in disjunctive, startling contexts. The heart appears throughout her work--as vital organ, container of the

soul, the spirit, and source of emotion.

In the drawing, “Epifania de la Tierra” (Epiphany of the Earth), hearts sprout from the soil like saplings yearning for the sun. On the horizon of this fertile field, uprooted trees soar into a sky charged with unrest. In the foreground, a young woman unearths one of the hearts to find a child’s pair of legs attached. Her wide-eyed innocence mirrors our own before this bizarre vision of birth and tempestuous demise.

Maya makes an analogy between the heart’s arteries and a tree’s branches in several images, part of a larger expression of her view of the affinity between human and organic realms. Two large, dynamic drawings of trees double as portraits of twisting torsos, rooted to the ground but with branches/arms reaching upward, striving for a higher reality. In “Madre Corazon” (Heart Mother), one of three delicate drawings on the theme of maternal, life-giving power, Maya substitutes a heart and healthy foliage for a woman’s head and shoulders.

The most profound use of the image of the heart appears in the painting, “Exodo” (Exodus), one of the quietest but most moving works in the show. A gray-haired man stands against a screen of tall, mist-enshrouded trees, his pale hazel eyes staring wistfully ahead. Beneath his arm he carries a small house, with a roof resembling a human heart and walls frayed into a web of ungrounded roots. A small patch of earth near him is stained red, indicating, perhaps, the site of the unrooting. “Exodo” illustrates in simple terms the adage that home is where the heart is, while also conveying a more complex and powerful portrait of loss, separation and exile.

Maya layers seemingly incongruous emotional and physical states throughout her work, evoking images both provocative and unsettling. Often she wraps her female figures in white, cocoon-like shrouds, linking them to both nascent and decaying states. They lie immobile, in a permanent dream state, the favorite realm of the founders of surrealism.

Death and life shadow each other closely here, two facets of the same evolving entity called existence. Their transfiguration from one into the other is rendered seamless in the painting, “Concepcion Inmaculada” (Immaculate Conception), where an auburn-maned woman and a similarly coiffed skeleton share a single white, billowing smock, bloated by the figure’s pregnancy. The cycle of birth and death becomes truly circular here, part of a continuum played out at once by a single individual.

Much of Maya’s work is, indeed, rich with poetic possibilities, but much is also mired in a stiff sentimentality. Her languorous sirens and brooding lovers drip with melodrama, cheap and over-acted, and her tight, linear drawing style sometimes stiffens and becomes static and lifeless. Underlying all of her work, however, is the potent realization that life and death, love and loss, the human and the organic all nurture each other while deepening each others’ mysteries.

Lucia Maya’s work can be seen at the Centro Cultural Tijuana (on Paseo de los Heroes) through Aug. 31. Also on view in a separate show, through Aug. 29, is a strong selection of prints on the theme of the Mexican revolution.