Inside the picture
The Jungles of Mariana Bunimov
A noun, cambur, is the seed of this ensemble of seven paintings. Cambur is the word for banana in Venezuela, Mariana Bunimov’s country of origin. The word is charged with memories for her. It designates a childhood treat, the mental imprint of a flavor, associated with a color: a bright yellow that saturates the environment, asserting the abundance of tropical nature. In her Parisian studio, it sounds like a secret (an enigma) and the call of exoticism: a kind of personal talisman. Mariana Bunimov first captured the image in two medium-sized paintings. Their tremulous execution calls up the name as much as the thing: the aptly-named ‘hand of bananas’. In cambur the tonic accent is very marked (more so than in the French pronunciation). The pictorial gesture translates, amplifies, the vocal intonation of the word. It is this process of amplification that evidently led to the large format of these seven paintings. Starting with The Jungle.
This title, like the painting itself, quotes a famous painting by the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam (1902-1982). The Jungle number two is not a remake but a revival (as we say for a play) of an iconic image from Caribbean art in the Surrealist period. Lam painted The Jungle in 1942-1943, back in Cuba, after having lived in Europe from 1923 to 1941. The Jungle painted in Paris in 2021 is less ‘monumental’; the composition is more open, the brighter chromatic range evokes the decorative vein in the work of Max Ernst, another major Surrealist painter. From Lam’s painting, the rhythm of the tall vertical bamboo stems and the structure of the totemic forms are deduced. A gust of burlesque has penetrated and dispersed the density of the tropical undergrowth. The masks and demons are replaced by two exogenous figurines hanging like trinkets: a military puppet on the left and a supermarket Santa Claus on the right. Lam's prickly and tumultuous vegetal architecture bore no fruit. The Jungle revisited is a burlesque land of plenty.
We find again the coupling of cambur and a motif borrowed from Lam (Maternity, 1952) in another work, painted just after The Jungle. Again, the jagged forms are lightened and softened. The hieratic figure of the mother and child is integrated into a larger ‘hierarchical’ construction. The bunch of bananas hanging above the mother and child is roughly aligned with the two side figures borrowed from ancient Mexican statuettes at the Amparo Museum in Mexico: a standing man in a feathered robe and a kneeling woman with a large geometric frieze covering her bust. The painting is thus ostensibly a montage of quotations, which upholds a bounteous image of motherhood.
Appropriation and montage are aspects of surrealist poetics, at least when artists set their unconscious free and follow their own trail. This is what Mariana Bunimov does, with conviction. Each painting is a specific composition, but the montage operates its game of shifts and associations between images. In a blue landscape of mountains, figurines from the ancient cultures of Central America (including a marvelous Thinker from the Olmec era) form a disparate population of deities that calls up the Parnassus of Greek mythology. But in a third painting, this vision of an ancestral world is contradicted by the view of an oil refinery in the blaze of dusk. The typological gap between an abstract landscape, devoid of any topographical reference, and a view inspired by a documentary photograph manifests the amplitude of the pictorial imagination. The painting is the common denominator between opposite emotional registers. But the pathos of the industrial (ecological?) catastrophe resonates with what we know of the destruction of Mesoamerican cultures.
In the heterogeneous ensemble formed by the seven paintings, destruction appears as a factor, or even as an element (in the sense of the four primordial elements of nature) creating the pictorial enjoyment. Destruction is latent, in an overtly decorative manner. This tension is particularly visible in the painting of airplanes. During my last visit to the studio, I saw the sky in the painting take on dark menace, a mood of rage: Mariana set out to disrupt the aerial ballet by imagining atmospheric turmoil. I was watching her work, and I was reminded of the infamous doldrums (pot-au-noir): that dreadfully unstable meteorological area called the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, the terror of sailors and aviators; Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes it in Wind, Sand and Stars (1939).
The Jungle is thus the place where the adventures of seeing and of painting intersect, in the midst of an ambivalent abundance of matter (substance and atmosphere mixed together).
Two paintings with a single motif complete the ensemble. The first depicts one of those puppets that haunt the imagery of the satirical grotesque: in this case, a portrait/caricature of a military officer, with his medals worn like baubles, cut out very simply against an indeterminate background, pink and black, ostensibly contrasting and dissonant. The painting is a kind of enlarged vignette, which responds, in a sarcastic way, to the antique figures of the large bluish landscape. The character surely evokes some childish imagery; mostly he corresponds to a type that clutters representations of political culture in Latin America.
The second painting suggests today’s reality of a world at war. Inspired by a documentary illustration, it depicts a large round negotiation table. The circle, described by the photographic image, is so vast that it is represented abstracted from any context (like the officer) and seems to float in a great atmospheric void. It emanates from the expansion of the circle produced by the turning movement of the pictorial gesture. We can make out the small human figures placed around the table. The motif contradicts that of the Jungle in every way, but both belong to the repertoire of the globalized world. The human jungle is reduced to an empty circle, or to a drop seen under a microscope, a bit disheveled around the edges.
Jean-François Chevrier