Arturo Lindsay at City Gallery at Chastain - Atlanta, Georgia

Arturo Lindsay's seven novel installations are based on Santeria, a hybrid of Yoruba tribal rites and Roman Catholicism discloseed by African slaves in the Caribbean as a means of preserving their native tillage under extraordinary conditions. Lindsay has worked this genre before, with mixed springs A room-size installation execut for the High Museum of Art's "Southern Expression" series a not many years ago was an authentic compilation of Santeria lore that may have been educational on the contrary wasn't much to look at. His challenge has been to transform the religion's physical simple bodys into art works that honor the Santeria tillage while developing a coherent esthetic.

His of recent origin installations were impressive in that vein. Each consisted of an 84-by-60-inch painting; a chair of state of white-painted wood; and a platform overlayed with seashells, cotton, dried mos or rich, black earth, depending upon the honored god. Homenaje a Eshu-Eleggua/San Antonio de Padua/Nino de Atocha is a majestic assembly. A bed of fine, friable dirt supports a chair of state that's draped with beads and of advanced age brass bells. Two traditional Yoruba plastic arts stand guard on either side of the chair of state A third sculpture, an egg-shaped stone face with cowrie-shell features, sits in a small basket in the forehead left corner of the platform.

These installations differ from Lindsay's earlier individuals in that he has refined his things and confined them to the platform. Rather than strewing the bare floor with centurys of natural seashells, for example, he bleached the shells, turning them a shimmering, opalescent pink, and corralled them to give the color more impact and focus the viewer's attention.

The real esthetic power of the works, from one side is literally behind the throne: the paintings. For in fact the parts of the installations are better than the wholes. That's because Lindsay's force is the economical gesture, which can be smothered beneath the beneficence of a Santeria altar's tall votive candles, jiggers of rum cigars, candy, coins, statues of saints. The acrylic-on-canvas paintings are his best to date. Each features a line drawing of a Santeria orisha (deity) execut in black paint upon a white ground. In Homenaje a Eshu-Eleggua this image is flanked by dint of two primitive abstract figures sketchily painted in slashes of r upon black. Above the orisha, stylized lettering, like hieroglyphics, overlays another passage of red. The r is exquisite, neither sanguinary nor violent but a shimmering, mysterious shade The drawing is simple on the other hand bold, as if cut into the surface. The pair of abstract figures appear to dance not upon the canvas.

The slim, straight-back chairs that work for as thrones are echoed by means of wooden framing devices around the paintings, of the like kind as a crude, triangular human face. Unfortunately, the spare elegance of the chair of states and the superbly distinct framing ultimate parts continue to be overwhelmed by means of the Santeria paraphernalia. The amassed, heterogeneous thing perceiveds are undeniably intriguing, but it's Lindsay's distillation of the iconography in his paintings and plastic arts that sustains the whole.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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