PAUL SIERRA: FAMILY PORTRAIT

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While all works of art are, to widely varying degrees,
representations of the artist himself and his state of mind,
Family Portrait offers an uncannily rich view of Sierra’s
self-awareness.  It shows not only the artist and his family
in the midst of an important life event, but also that life
event embellished with stylized metaphorical flourishes.

One of the most beloved paintings in the Brauer Museum’s permanent collection is a large oil on canvas painting entitled Family Portrait (1991) by the Cuban-born contemporary Chicago artist Paul Sierra (born 1944).  This dramatic work depicts the artist’s family fleeing Cuba by boat, challenged in their escape by a curiously animate column of fire.  In the lower right corner of the painting, one can see a portrait of the artist himself caught in mid-creation, frozen in a gesture and expression that seems to communicate the grave resignation, the sense of enormous responsibility one must feel in painting a visual, allegorical, autobiographical work that records a key, pivotal moment in his life.  Thus, Family Portrait is a painting of the artist painting the painting viewers are viewing.  While all works of art are, to widely varying degrees, representations of the artist himself and his state of mind, Family Portrait offers an uncannily rich view of Sierra’s self-awareness.  It shows not only the artist and his family in the midst of an important life event, but also that life event embellished with stylized metaphorical flourishes.  These flourishes (such as the column of flame, the layered and scalloped waves, and the fractured, compressed pictorial space) are only possible in the world of artistic creativity, a point made visually by the artist figure who stands in the lower corner of the work.
     Family Portrait, then, serves as a fine summary of Sierra’s intentions and goals for his art.  It also establishes a firm autobiographical foundation for an understanding of his various pieces. Sierra's Cuban heritage, his desire to show the capability of all things to have a symbolic aspect, his playful tendency to spice representations of the ordinary world with juxtapositions that reveal the potency of art's capacity to reveal or create magic — all of these elements work together to produce a highly personal body of work that calls attention to the alarming, the exciting, the poetic, and the strange.  Small manipulations, simple combinations serve to lure the viewer into pictorial spaces where anything can and does happen.  Like the nude figures in Sierra’s recent paintings of divers plunging into richly blue waters, viewers must leap into an active acceptance and interpretation of the artist’s juxtapositions to benefit from the thrills and, paradoxically, the comforts that emerge.
     In a 2003 Brauer Museum exhibition of Sierra’s new and recent creations, accompanying Family Portrait were a number of very small canvases that Sierra painted in the last few years.  These small works served as additional glimpses into the thought processes of the artist and related well to the epic autobiographical piece described earlier.  The paintings, many of them depicting birds in the company of human hands or faces, show Sierra’s interest in and connection with the natural world.  In the tropical environment of Cuba, Sierra most likely saw many colorful birds or was pleasantly surprised by various birds, lizards, and exotic insects appearing, even intruding, in various places and situations during his life there.  To a young and imaginative mind, Cuba probably seemed like a place where anything could happen.  Surrounded by so much growing and living, the artist perhaps saw these states of being and the plants and animals themselves as inspiring elements with which he could build a vocabulary of images.  Birds (although not necessarily tropical ones; the possible sources of early inspiration seem to have given way to those species that currently surround him), plants, and people interrelate in Sierra’s world in a way that may occasionally seem disturbing or unsettling.   However, the relationships he portrays refer to a much larger cycle of life, perhaps upsetting in its frankness at times but ultimately reassuring in its reliance on dependable logic and beautiful in the multitude of visual and tactile rhymes available to the eye of the careful observer.
     Also included in the Brauer exhibition were several paintings by Sierra of a house on fire, the flames from which offered a visual rhyme and perhaps a conceptual connection to the animate flame column in Family Portrait.  These paintings provided another example of the strange beauty that arises from the artist’s choice of challenging and satisfying juxtapositions.  One seemed to feel when viewing these works that they had a generalized, dreamlike (but still believable and visually logical) quality.  Contrasts such as a warm home versus a burning house, a visually-inviting scene composed of lush colors nevertheless showing a tragic event, illustrated the complexities that lie at the heart of Sierra’s work.  While these burning houses appeared particularly aggressive in the context of other pieces on display and may have addressed some incident in the artist’s life of particular pain, they demonstrated in general the artist’s overall interest in examining one’s own life, the components of one’s surroundings, to find images of rich metaphorical value.  Through self-examination, an awareness of what he sees around him, and a mastery of his craft, Sierra is able to adjust his level of stylization (tending, for example, toward caricature in some pictures and working very realistically in others) to suit the subject and the theme he feels it seems to communicate.  His end results are works of art that are intimately tied to his life, in terms of the literal events depicted and the various interpretive layers or twists he has added since its initial experience that reveal so much about his individual way of seeing the world.  Sierra’s art ultimately helps the viewer to be more alive and observant by prodding him, challenging him, urging him to awaken from the sleep state of mere life.

  
© by Gregg Hertzlieb