back to series

 
Terra Nostra, 1987

 
 
 
 
About this series  
 

9 paintings evoking Terra Nostra, a novel by Carlos Fuentes published in 1975.

Gaps between faces and masks, between “ser” and “estar” (to be and to appear). Black (emptiness) plays an essential role here.

 
 
 
What Micheline LO said about it  
 

Carlos Fuentes sees his Mexico through Spain, and Spain through his Mexico. He spreads his vision across time, crossing both centuries and the Atlantic Ocean.

[Terra Nostra], romantic monument, engulfs the Spanish court in darkness. Darkness governs the king's mood, heightens the unquenchable mourning of the queen mother, Joanna the Mad, and even envelops the royal consort, ill-suited to her costume. Whether dark or colorful, the nine portraits are masks.

 
 
 
What Henri VAN LIER said about it  
 

The relationship between Spain and Central America since 1500 remains an extremely troubling phenomenon for those intrigued by cerebral landscapes.

Two civilizations meet, confront and destroy each other, while at the same time sharing a community of views on life and death, on the all and the nothing, the imaginary and the real, sufficient to give rise to a new civilization, "Amerindia". Carlos Fuentes took this entanglement as a theme for his monumental Terra Nostra, where he weaved a web of bicontinental, transoceanic characters. Micheline Lo has retained the cerebral landscapes of the most famous: the King, the Queen, the Queen Mother, Guzman, Barbarica, the Idiot, the Mason.

When offered to choose one from among those paintings, Fuentes selected Barbarica, for — as he explained in his letter — in this he found "la tradición Velasquiana con la del esperpento (Ghelderode) y Ensor". "Esperpento" was illuminating, for a scarecrow alone was truly apt to gather and compress contradictions. Flaubert used to ritualistically take his visitors at Croisset to a neighboring puppet show. Micheline Lo had retained a memory from her adolescence, almost traumatic, of the Greek actors perched on their cothurni, ancient esperpentos, in Cohen's production of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, played by students of the Sorbonne.