Ernesto Pujol Galeria Ramis Barquet

Over the last decade Ernesto Pujol has created a significant and eloquent body of work including painting, conceptual photography, and installations. The artist has questioned the politics of identity and power relationships, addressed issues of exile, expanded the dialogue on religion as a contemporary art form, critiqued gender representation and historical genocide, and examined man-made alterations of the natural environment. His work draws on art history, popular culture, film studies, and contemporary criticism. In Silence of Song Birds, his latest exploration, the artist explores the liminality of life and death in his characteristically meditative manner.

Pujol's language is spare, his thinking processes profound, his planning and execution extremely meticulous. To some degree, these attributes can be explained as much by the specifics of his artistic training as by the rigorous educational and ethical religious preparation he pursued in the Roman Catholic Church before becoming a practicing artist. In reviewing a few significant and unusual contributions, one finds his aesthetics identifiably recognizable, intellectually challenging, and conceptually surprising. For The Children of Peter Pan, 1995, a site-specific installation in Havana, Cuba, the artist constructed a series of mise-en-scénes with found domestic objects. Inspired by the emotional pain caused by collective exile, this project attempted to create a dialogue among artists on both sides of the political divide and thus initiate a process of reconciliation.

In Picnic, 1997, Pujol critiqued the nature of power relationships through objects embodying traditional gender roles. With the introduction of sculptural objects in the form of prepubescent male genitals, Pujol inserted a nontraditional reading of the gay male. His study of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, 1974—79 and the movie Picnic, 1955 offered compelling ideas for his departures.

Pujol presented Whiteness, 1999 in a Chelsea gallery that featured white vintage dishes (as well as chromogenic prints of them) and little boys' white booties in cast resin, among other elements. Arranged as a still life, the objects imparted a sense of beauty, formality, and elegance. Their apparent innocence was subverted when the spectator discovered the manufacturer's stamp with the symbol of the swastika—a quintessential image of evil—on the plates.

The Silence of Song Birds, at the Galeria Ramis Barquet, was a quietly beautiful but subliminally disturbing exhibition that also seemed innocent at first glance. The larger gallery exhibited large-format chromogenic prints of purebred canaries that are fed a color-enhancing diet to produce their brilliant yellow, red, and white feathers. By isolating and enlarging their flittering movements in each frame, each small bird assumes a larger-than-life presence. The smaller gallery featured small photos of songbirds, together with drawings, dictionary words, and cages, each element contributing in turn to the layered narrative. One of the cages had its door open, suggesting flight; another was installed on the wall in a series of fragments, suggesting a broken structure.

Some of the drawings were made over individual words that referred to memories of things, ideas, or places special to the artist. Other words appeared to have been randomly chosen. The iconographical program comes full circle in a one-hour video titled Minutes to Infinity in which the camera focuses on the intermediary moments of repeated fluttering and stillness of a white female canary that does not sing. The video is shot as if it were a meditative exercise focusing on the intangible states of fragility, solitude, and confinement. Although Pujol has included birds as metaphors in previous work, his investigation of songbirds as an independent subject began a few years ago, with serious preliminary work starting in summer 2001. One of the cages had its door open, suggesting flight; another was installed on the wall in a series of fragments, suggesting a broken structure.

The iconographical program comes full circle in a one-hour video titled Minutes to Infinity in which the camera focuses on the intermediary moments of repeated fluttering and stillness of a white female canary that does not sing. The video is shot as if it were a meditative exercise focusing on the intangible states of fragility, solitude, and confinement.

Although Pujol has included birds as metaphors in previous work, his investigation of songbirds as an independent subject began a few years ago, with serious preliminary work starting in summer 2001. However, in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center—which Pujol witnessed— he began to see parallels between the twin towers and the cages: both were structures of containment, albeit in different operational modes. He compared the birds, always trying to get out of their cages, to the trapped people in the upper stories of the towers. The songbirds were metaphors for life and its inevitable flip side, death.

The exhibition was visually gorgeous, in large part because of the natural beauty of the different species of canaries, one of many songbirds. In addition to the show's sensorial effects, an element of surprise confronts us when we least expect it in that sudden moment when we realize the fragility of existence.

— Julia P. Herzberg

This review, Ernesto Pujol: The Silence of Song Birds, was published in Art Nexus 52:3 (2004):151.
Artwork © Ernesto Pujol

Artist website: www.ernestopujol.org