By Nii B. Andrews.
The Cuban artist, Belkis Ayón committed suicide in 1999.
She was then aged 32; her artistic reputation and career were ascending internationally and she had devoted her enigmatic prints to the story of princess Sikán, the only woman in Abakuá lore.
Sikán was put to death for revealing the all male society’s secrets to her fiance, a prince in an enemy nation.
The Abakuà secret society survived the trauma and brutality of the Middle Passage and its rituals and symbols (from the area that is now Nigeria) acted as a pivot for male bonding and fraternalism in the New World.
Ayón probed the breadth and depth of Abakuà themes – love, betrayal, grief, devotion, self-sacrifice – and produced art of such sheer power to suggest that much more was at stake than an artist’s curiosity about a secret society.
Her work transcended the confines of gender and transmited prominently the range of emotional and psychological states offered by the Abakuá narrative – over and above its socio-political implications.
Ayón had long perceived Sikán as a kind of alter ego who the artist gave prominence through a masterful blend of multiple grey textures in her work.
She utilised a labor intensive process called collography; it involved collaging materials onto a cardboard matrix and producing a variety of textures with which she created large individual prints of mural size that often referenced a black forest.
Some examples of her work resonate with epic themes that possibly speak to her frame of mind as she appears to conflate myth with reality.
Ayón never abandoned her robust counter narrative against despotism, intolerance, marginalisation and powerlessness.
She presents us with trapped women sometimes in the midst of a spiralling tempest; anguish, fear and distress in the face of death – perhaps presaging her own sacrifice, even as her avatar, the mystical talking fish was sacrificed?
Her work by the mid 90s had become more complex; she began to bring her work off the wall; her piece displayed at the 1993 Venice Biennale, depicting the earthly and celestial realms – juts out from the wall diagonally.
There have been numerous exhibitions in important museums to showcase her work. Currently showing in Madrid is “Belkis Ayón: Collographs” at the Reina Sofía until 18 April 2022.
