Elizam Escobar at the Institute for Puerto Rican Culture - San Juan, Puerto Rico - Review of Exhibitions

Visitors to Elizam Escobar's new exhibition "Transfixiones" were greeted by the agency of La maquina del tiempo (The Time Machine), a painting showing the artist - draw as by a rope noose trailing from his neck his head make go rounded to look behind him - flying into space upon a bicycle. With its implied defiance of authority and air of unreality, this allegorical self - portrait was typical of the present to view of 70-plus works (mostly paintings, as well as single installation). Escobar chose the title "Transfixiones" to bear his belief in art's power to pierce social myths; he also had in mind the bilingual interplay between "transfixiones" and "fictions."

While Escobar usually avoids direct political statements in his art, he makes the viewer aware of his "prisoner-of-war" status. Since 1980 Escobar has been in U federal prison serving a 68-year opinion for "seditious conspiracy" as a rise of membership in the Puerto Rican Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN). In his theoretical writings published in journals like Rethinking Marxism, Third body and Left Curve, Escobar argues against the use of art as propaganda and in favor of artistic autonomy. Given his situation, these issues take upon heightened urgency.

Although Escobar cast aways what he calls "political-direct" art, his hold political position was clearly evok in a series of multi-panel self-portraits. single of these, titled Heuristica Uno, addresses the threat to Puerto Rican national identity and tillage through painted alterations to photographs of the artist. in single panel he subjects himself to anatomical distortion a la Francis Bacon, another has him confine and gagged (a reference to the notorious Puerto Rican "muzzle law"); in a third he is marked with tribal war paint and a fourth panel exhibits him covered with the colors of the Puerto Rican flag. These panels environ a painted, dreamlike image of Escobar escaping f rom a coffin.

Another series portrays the artist in various guises, from animals (armadillo, pit male cockroach) to the religious figure, the Virgin of Otoao. In individual work, Escobar dons an avejigante mask, an African influenced image that has become a staple of Puerto Rican curio stores Escobar seeks to reclaim the avejigante image from the tourist industry by the agency of restablishing it as a dangerous, revolutionary, trickster figure.

If Escobar is waiting for freedom from prison, in paintings like Sala de Espera (Waiting Room) or El Juicio de la Pintura (The Trial of the Painting), he presents waiting as an ontological condition. in sum of two units other paintings, El proceso (The Process) and Misa del nuevo mundo (Mass of the novel World), he presents a cavalcade of saltimbanques, oppressively freighted with nooses and crucifixes. These figures exemplify the uneasy dialogue that Escobar's politically charged allegories look after with their spectators.

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