Haiti From 2 Perspectives : Art: Voodoo flags and oil paintings, in two exhibits, show the light, the colors and the emotion of the Caribbean nation.

Haiti: poorest, most illiterate country in the Western Hemisphere, mother of massacring coup after coup, birthplace of the depraved Tontons Macoutes, the terror police who killed untold thousands on the island. This is the Haiti we often hear about.

But as macabre as this Haiti is, there is a Haiti equally extreme: a nation whose wealth can be measured in incandescent images rendered by artists, both indigenous and American.

“Sequinned Surfaces: Vodoun Flags from Haiti,” a private collection of 51 vodoun or voodoo flags, opens at Cal State Northridge on Monday, remaining through Dec. 20. Believed to be the first complete collection of vodoun flags or drapeaux exhibited in Los Angeles, it “represents another art form coming out of Haiti, which stands on its own merits,” said Delores Yonkers, curator and art history professor at CSUN.

A lecture, Haitian music and food will be part of the opening reception.

“What I want this exhibition to represent is an image of vodoun which shows it’s based on principles of light and well-being instead of darkness and malice,” Yonkers said. “These flags, made in religious context, represent a visionary tradition.” The collection, on loan from owners Candice Russell and Jeff Rusnak, “has imaginative depth, a marvelous color sense, wonderful decorative complications . . . and very elaborate motifs,” she said.

Although the flag collection is not historic (the oldest flag is dated 1985), the loas or spirits emblazoned upon the flags with sequins and beads offer a visual education to the sacred ritual of vodoun, a fundamentally African religion that evolved for centuries in Haiti, eventually merging icons of the loas with those of Catholicism.

Called the finest tradition of popular art in the world by Andre Malroux, Charles de Gaulle’s minister of culture, vodoun flags have forged their own genre, full of religious aesthetic: beautiful and inventive.

Take a flag in the collection emblazoned with an image of St. Jacques Majeure, St. James Major, the Catholic warrior-saint who was victorious over the Moors. Combined with the Ogun Feraille spirit of Africa, St. Jacques carries a crusader’s banner and sword. A warrior loa, Ogun Feraille is identified with all forms of iron, especially swords, and the color red. His favored libation is bull’s blood.

Copied from a chromolithograph, the actual chromolithograph face is incorporated into the design with the saint glancing backward. Atop a rearing white sequined horse, he holds his black sword high, wearing a brilliant spread of bluish-purple beads with a luminous halo of silver crowning his head. A heart of black beads and a tricolored star stand on each side of the flag. Light dances from sequin to sequin.

Symbolizing justice and liberty, Ogun Feraille is defender of the oppressed. Those possessed by him can handle burning brands, swallow fire, walk on fire and handle objects in boiling oil, Yonkers said.

But more than aesthetic objet d’ art, the flags are an integral part of the sacred ritual of vodoun, where a pantheon of 401 loas are invoked by serviteurs or devotees . All flags are designed and made under the supervision of a hougan or mambo , a priest or priestess, and take about a month to create, Yonkers said.

At the beginning of ceremonies--performed on holidays, for rites of passage or to squelch a streak of bad luck--two women called drapo, or flag queens, are entrusted to carry the flags. These flags herald the coming of the spirits, the possession of devotees by spirits, or the arrival of important visitors in the temple, and are believed to possess a magical power activated in the rhythmic movements of ritual. Their designs are taken from spirits as they appear in chromolithographs or in the veves , designs drawn by the hougan or mambo on the temple floor for spirits invoked in ceremony. Afterward, the emblems are stored in closed shrines, or bagi, to restore their power after use, Yonkers said. (On average, the flags measure 30 by 40 inches.)

Historically, flags in vodoun descended from Dahomey, now called the Republic of Benin, where appliqued banners were used as paeans to a king in the same way vodoun flags are paeans to the spirits, Yonkers said. Another Dahomeyan antecedent comes from the practice of gazing into water or mirrors as a method of divination.

“The glittering surfaces of the flag are like the reflective surfaces of water or mirrors, beneath which the diviner envisions emblems of a spiritual truth,” Yonkers said. “Vodoun is far from being a religion of darkness; it’s the aesthetic of resplendence because of the heavy emphasis on light as a sacred power.”

But Haitians are not alone in taking their inspiration from the Caribbean island. Franceska Schifrin, an oil painter born and raised in Topanga, has traveled to Haiti since 1988 to paint impressions of Haitian people and animals in colors from blood red and mustard yellow to brilliant purples and Maxfield Parrish blues.

Schifrin, 31, likes to paint expansive canvases, which fill her Topanga home and studio. In one picture, gangly women lie prostrate, arms outstretched, before a towering cross. Their large, dark feet and hands are splayed in emotion, contrasted against the scene, washed in gray and white.

In another canvas, a mother swathed in a crimson and mustard-colored cloth, her shy, naked child pressed against her side, tugs with one hand at her draping. Their faces are awash with crimson. In another, done in hues of blue, a big sister rests a reassuring hand on her little sister, whose arms cross over her bare chest above her bloated belly.

This is the emotional Haiti, the Haiti that Schifrin has invoked repeatedly in her broad-stroked paintings.

“In Haiti, I can see the way people live,” says Schifrin. “Haitians are out front, very vibrant, very expressive, emotional people. Life is more accessible there. I try to show daily emotions, whether it’s a mother and child or a husband and wife. I’m interested in the universal things that everyone goes through. I use color for emotional impact, and color there is different, because of the light.”

Selma Holo, curator of USC’s Fisher Gallery, calls Schifrin’s style “expressionistic realism.” (Holo sat on the California Arts Council award panel that granted Schifrin a $15,000 fellowship from the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts in 1991.)

“There is a real, raw human energy that defies the kind of trendiest art we see today,” Holo said. “Her art is very lively, and she’s a terrific craftsman. It has real soul, and I was captivated by her drawing--almost the eccentricity of it. She has a real private vision, but she’s also real connected to the world and its pain.”

That pain can be seen in Schifrin’s use of Haiti’s tumult as subject. “The Yellow Silence of Morning Light” shows the backs of gun-toting soldiers. Faceless, helmeted men point their barrels down a bright ocher street bordered by buildings, suggesting hunters and the hunted.

But the political turmoil, pathetic poverty and brutality of terror do little to diminish this artist’s passion for the place.

“I love Haiti,” she said. “I have innumerable ideas and images that I haven’t created yet. I will keep going back to Haiti for the rest of my life. I would go back even if I never painted another image of it.”

“Sequinned Surfaces: Vodoun Flags from Haiti” opens Monday at Cal State Northridge Art Galleries. Continues through Dec. 20. Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, noon to 4 p.m. Monday and Saturday. Call: (818) 885-2226. The Franceska Schifrin exhibit at University of Judaism’s Platt Gallery will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday, by appointment Sundays and evenings from Nov. 21 through Jan. 6. Call (310) 476-9777. The show at the National Council for Jewish Women, Los Angeles auditorium, 543 Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles, will be open from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday, till 8 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, weekends by appointment from Nov. 14 through Feb. 10. Call (310) 651-2930.