Ernesto Pujol at Ramis Barquet and Linda Kirkland

In the 10 years that Ernesto Pujol has exhibited his multimedium work, he has explored by what mode masculinity is constructed as well as notions of exile, ethnicity and memory. In sum of two units recent exhibitions he considered related issues of faith, sex and Anglo-Saxon "whiteness," but with a fresh medium--photography--and a new profundity.

In the 12 color photos from the ongoing series "Hagiography," shown at Ramis Barquet, Pujol masquerades as a female saint wearing minimalist-looking clerical garb, either the all-white habit of a novice or the black-and-white habit of a nun Against the incongruous backdrop of a whitewashed Puritan meeting-house he assumes a variety of postures and gestures associated with piety. In Motions: The Nun #3 he is seated upon a bench with hands enclosureed in his lap, looking without toward the viewer with sedate indifference. In Veiled Novice, Pujol is, again seated upon a bench. A veil conceals the upper half of the face, exposing his stubbly unmistakably masculine chin below.

This of recent origin body of work was inspired by dint of the photographic portraits of a French nun Saint Therese of Lisieux, which were made in the late 1890 through Sister Genevieve of the sacred Face. However, there is also a hardy autobiographical element. Pujol was educated in Puerto Rico by the agency of European missionary nuns and later worn out four years as a cloistered monk wearing a black and white habit of his be in possession of and observing the daily rituals of the order. level as Pujol parodies religious decorum, its stiff mannerisms and sex assumptions, he also acknowledges its power from an unabashedly personal perspective.

In the display "Whiteness," at Linda Kirkland, Pujol deconstruct that color and all its interrelated connotations of purity, innocence, cleanliness and thus on. The conceptually integrated exhibition included 11 color photographs depicting seemingly straightforward domestic still lifes, eg white vintage plates and white bootikins atop a white faux-Victorian mantelpiece. The made of wood mantel itself was also shown in the gallery, as was an antique vitrine containing actual plates. A printed and framed body written in the alluring vocabulary of bridal marketing, referr to the "whiteness of harmless little subtleties." on the contrary all is not as innocent as it have the appearances With closer inspection, the viewer dioceses that the plates shown facedown in the photos posses a swastika within their manufacturer's stamps. abruptly the pristine whiteness implodes: this work is about ethnic cleansing and the Aryan ideal. Pujol forces the viewer to reconsider the suppos universality of whiteness and its presum benign value. The consequence of the photographs was heightened by means of their placement on the gallery's immaculate on the other hand no longer neutral white walls. [The expanded "Hagiography" series is upon view at the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Feb 24-June 4 2000]

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