Ernesto Pujol at Linda Kirkland and the Bronx Museum - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

A participant in last year's Johannesburg, Saaremaa and Havana biennials, Cuban-born Ernesto Pujol is better known abroad than in the U These exhibitions at Linda Kirkland Gallery and the Bronx Museum provided a broad introduction to the artist's nearly decade-long reflections upon masculinity. Drawing on psychoanalytic and feminist theory, Pujol's installations roll round an axis around charged childhood memories that have l him to reflect upon the construction of gender.

At Kirkland, Pujol created a cheery white nursery that contained a crib; above it hung a mobile made of dangling knives. Aside from the obvious allusion to the part that castration fantasies play in structuring the male psyche, knives also figure within Pujol's personal iconography as signs of artistic ability and national identity. Not single did his first drawing work feature a lesson in in what way to depict knives, but the artist has since used knives, particularly machetes, as codfished references meant to affirm his Cuban heritage. of that kind condensed, multilayered associations enable The Crib to function as a rich allegory of Pujol's life.

The adjoining space of the gallery held several additional works related to the theme of childhood. In the installation The Aviary, plastic arts of winged, pre-pubescent penises were displayed in bird cages. Like The Crib, an autobiographical subtext animates The Aviary. In an artist's statement, Pujol writes that his father built an aviary as a means to forward his son's skills with tools, on the other hand Pujol's apparent ineptness at hammering alienated the father from the stripling Pujol thus describes The Aviary as being about the solitude of a lad for whom caged birds became external mirrors of his self Male genitalia are also cleverly manipulated in The Team, which consists of seven clay penises shaped into baseballs resting upon catcher's mitts; this work appear to bes to parody the conflation of masculinity and athletics.

Quotations from art history were rife in The Picnic, Pujol's elaborately staged installation at the Bronx Museum. In a dimly lit play that simulated a forest clearing, sum of two units picnic tables were arrayed with silverware, hunter's tools and ceramic phalluses laid without on plates. Completing the tabletop sight were troops of tiny phalluses scattered about like ants. Inspired through two of the artist's favorite works, Goya's Saturn Devouring single of His Sons and Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, the installation was simultaneously gory and goofy -- an unexpect feast for the psyche. Its spectacular appeal give an inkling ofs that Pujol's tableaux work best when they are enlivened through his arcane sense of humor and theatricality.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group