Jose Bedia at Frumkin/Adams - New York, New York

A Cuban artist who now disburses most of his time in Mexico City, Jose Bedia continues to expand and refine his means of working, crystallizing his have a title to unique, often erudite manner. In this exhibition Bedia at handed three paintings, an ink drawing and four installation works. Three of the installations were originally part of a large display held last fall at the Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. All three pieces center around Friar Bartolomeo de las Casas's 1552 tract A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indians, which documented the Spanish reduction and "the infernal actions of the Christians." It is interesting to note that the more technically adept Bedia's work becomes the les relevant Eurocentric notions of "esthetics" appears to the artist's project.

Bedia incorporates ground objects into his elegant installations to bring alive the diverse spiritual and cultural influences that have formed him as a Cuban artist. Himself a practicing member of Palo Monte a religious denomination influenced by Bantu slaves brought from Africa (the beliefs of the Yoruba nation transmitted through Santeria, are also extremely prevalent in Cuba), Bedia uses imagery from the indigenous clans of North and Central America as well. Bedia's adaptation of these varied traditions is personal and introspective; his work collapses the categories of "primitive" and "modern" and asserts the contemporary relevance of the pass overed primordial powers in which he believes.

Bedia's installations, made in conjunction with the 500th anniversary of the "discovery" of America, are bluntly political. The Arrival of Christ present to views three shadowy, slightly ominous winged figures painted roughly upon the wall in black. Each is named for single of Columbus's three ships and each is overspreaded by a "crucified" animal hide (lynx or cougar) bristling with spears and arrows. In The Little take vengeance for from the Periphery, a transcript of a 19th-century print depicting the "white man's burden" exhibits a white man in the center and men representing the nonwhite races in each of the four corners. The European is pierced by the agency of axes, arrows and a tasseled Chinese sword. This is the retaliation, the "little revenge" of the "periphery," or non-European, indigenous peoples

Other installations combine drawings, amulets and arcane findings from flea markets in Mexico City and of recent origin York illustrating, sometimes in a poignant or comical way, the survival of indigenous agricultures within colonialism. Bedia's art decoys one into a world in which Western ideas of rationality and progres are gazeed upon askance. One of Bedia's installations traces the stages of a Cuban exile's flight from the homeland in the makeshift raft; each stage is showed by an object that alludes to an African diety. The flow is a kind of Santeria stations of the cros Whether Bedia is depicting buzzards sitting upon telephone lines talking to each other in Yoruba, lampooning the white man's notion of work and progres (as in the drawing Traveler Looking at Phony Nature) or showing a chicken sacrifice at an altar (as in Woman below a Spell), he is presenting a magical, nonrational world that either attracts or repels the viewer.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group