Bibiana Suarez at Sazama - Chicago, Illinois - Review of Exhibitions

Bibiana Suarez's earlier drawings, images of solitary islands adrift in oceans of unblemished color, metaphorically refer to the artist's homeland, Puerto Rico, while ambiguous biomorphic forms symbolize her search for identity. Issues of place and self of cultural dislocation and assimilation, also permeate a novel series of nine large pastel drawings center upon the pelea de gallo, or cockfight, the violent ritualized sport of her birthplace.

For Suarez, the cockfight symbolizes her personal make an effort as an artist as well as Puerto Rico's search for economic freedom and national identity. De Pico a Pico (Beak to Beak) is an imposing image of victory and defeat in which sum of two units roosters confront each other like valiant soldiers: single bird is neatly combed and fruit of the plum-treeed while his opponent is bald and skeletal. There is a baroque theatricality to this work and others, of the like kind as Derrota (Defeat) and Rebate (Refusal). In the former, a rotting corpse provides a richly detailed and macabre image of death; the latter exhibits a heroic wounded cock whose sharp points are still poised to strike.

Suarez has always been an artist in search of compelling and meaningful form. Her earlier geographic/biomorphic mappings were too literal to full embody her complex concerns. Now her drawing is more graphically unfolded and displays a new facility, while a heightened palette and a grander scale underscore her subject's inherent drama and speak more vehemently to issues of politics, one as well as the other personal and social. Suarez's best works are those whose expressive easy in mind is achieved succinctly. In Cualidades Necessarias en un Buen Gallo de Pelea (Qualities Necessary in a serviceable Fighting Cock), the image of a stripped gallo becomes a locus for definitions of racial and cultural identity. Various characteristics are numbered and labeled (in Spanish) upon the schematic drawing. "That he should throw back his good breeding in the face of the greatest in quantity grievous wounds" captures the pride and pain of Suarez's personal labor and that of her native Puerto Rico.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group