LINO BERNABE. The Three Metamorphoses

About

The Chimney is pleased to present “The Three Metamorphoses” by Cuban-American artist Lino Bernabe.
In six paintings produced site-specifically to fill the gallery’s windows, the artist reveals a mythical bestiary borrowed from Christian and Hindu mythologies, African stories, Florida’s folktales, Greek epic poems and Palaeolithic legends.
Filtered through the artist’s personal encounters with the animal realm, these myths are presented anew. As the gallery is immersed in successive blue, green and red lights, the works sensitively react to the varying chromatic stimulus and unveil a cinematic narrative of hybrid creatures able to shapeshift into half-man, half-animal beings. With his technical mastering of color physics, the artist uses this light sequencing technique to divide each painting into three subsequent scenes, three metamorphoses. 

Therianthropy - the mythological human-to-animal transformation is found in tales across cultures and civilizations. Whether spawned by divine intervention or extraordinary human ability, these fantastical stories have been recounted for thousands of years in stelas, temples, cave paintings and church frescoes. Based on a variety of visual representations, such as Renaissance masterpieces and kitsch cultural artefacts, each work in this exhibition is an aggregation of several narratives interwoven in their symbolism and iconography. From legendary beasts to religious icons, Bernabe’s interest in the varying appearances and meanings of a symbol across history concurrently arises with a desire to grasp how artists have subjectively appropriated these "eternal myths" and manipulated them in their individual representations (Carl Jung, 1964). 

The story of “Blue” (Cain and Abel) is inspired by Ted Hughes’ poem “Second Glance at a Jaguar” (1967) and vividly describes a forceful and ambivalent encounter between a virile man and a feline. In the painting’s first scene, the standing warrior, painted in a realist manner, fiercely holds a jawbone towards the wild animal – a posture that also alludes to the religious scene of Cain slaying Abel – the two sons of Adam and Eve, painted by Paul Rubens (1608-09). As the scene evolves, his human hand morphs into a spiked claw and the jaguar, reduced to simpler geometric lines, acquires anthropomorphic attributes. 
Raised in Miami, crocodiles, both in nature and as part of visual folktales have been part of the artist’s everyday life. In “Green” (Uncle Monday), Bernabe explores the multifaceted symbolism of that animal, both in popular culture and ancient civilization. This reptile metamorphosis simultaneously points to the Floridian myth of Uncle Monday, an enslaved man who majestically transforms into an alligator to escape the hands of his owner, and to the Egyptian deity Sobek, lord of the Nile, creator of the universe.

In the following “Red (Pasiphaë)” and “Yellow” (Diana and Actaeon), Bernabe appropriates renowned Greek myths to subvert the traditional representation of the eroticized woman and emphasizes her feminine strength, willingly assertive of her desires.
In “Red (Pasiphaë)”, Bernabe illustrates the Greek myth of the Cretan Queen Pasiphaë and the Minotaur. Her husband, King Minos, refuses to sacrifice the snow-white bull offered to him by Poseidon. As  punishment, the god of the sea curses Pasiphaë with an insatiable lust for the bull. With the help of the architect Daedalus, she hides in the wooden exoskeleton of a cow to mate with the animal, subsequently giving birth to the Minotaur, the legendary bull-headed monster. As Pasiphaë forcefully dominates the composition throughout each scene, the bull is progressively abstracted to a sinuous and aquatic shape. Bernabe grants prominence to Pasiphaë’s yearnings rather than on the fruit of the inhuman union with the imposing beast.
In “Yellow” (Diana and Actaeon), Bernabe interprets the famous myth of Diana and Actaeon described in Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 AD). Actaeon, a young hunter, accidentally stumbles upon the nude Goddess bathing. Infuriated, she transforms him into a deer to be eaten by his own hunting dogs. Caught in a momentum, Diana vitally propels herself into the air as she allegorically incarnates the moon, and forcefully draws back the bow-strings toward the vulnerable Actaeon. In his reclining pose, the hunter’s exposed limbs and elongates until he reaches his new bestial physique: a graceful and slender deer. 

Hindu icons permeate the painting “Cyan” (Varahi). Varahi – a mother goddess, the wife of Vishnu’s avatar Varaha, is depicted in this work as a dancing boar-headed woman with multiple swinging arms surrounded by small demons named Raktabija. As the red light unravels the following scene, the now woman-faced Varahi reveals a third-eye - the symbol of spiritual knowledge in Hinduism. Traditionally depicted with a sword in temples and shrines across India, Varahi here holds a mace – a weapon most often depicted with the male energy Vahara or Vishnu. 

Magenta exists at both ends of the color spectrum; it acts as “a seam, as the navel that holds the color wheel in a circle,” as Bernabe expressed. A beginning and an end, this material quality drove the poetic choice of the narrative of the painting “Magenta” (Inanna). Drawing from one of the most feminine deities, the Sumerian Goddess Inanna (also known as Ishtar in Akkadian tradition), the figure is associated with fertility and warfare, birth and death. In her majestic demeanour, the winged woman-divinity also holds the vitality of the solar and legendary bird, the Phoenix, who rises from the ashes and cyclically regenerates.

In “The Three Metamorphoses”, Lino Bernabe converges mythologies from the four corners of the world to excavate the underlying melody of the universe. These symbolic narratives, which can serve as religious dogmas, are nonetheless transformed, twisted, and imbued with the artist’s unfettered imagination.