Trouble in paradise: Bony Ramirez show at Newark Museum of Art explores complexities of island life
TRIS McCALL
Island hospitality is phony. That’s the cynical statesider’s supposition, anyway: that the big smile of the cabana boy, the crispness of the…
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Island hospitality is phony. That’s the cynical statesider’s supposition, anyway: that the big smile of the cabana boy, the crispness of the bellhop, the servility of the concierge are all covers for a deep reserve of distrust, and even dislike, of the Yankee patron. The more we know about the Caribbean, the worse that suspicion gets. Each interaction between a worker and a visitor, right down to the tip on the check, happens in the context of an ugly history. It’s enough to sour a rum punch.

Bony Ramirez — a Dominican-born, Perth Amboy-raised artist — has seen both sides of this dynamic. In “Caribe Express/Caribe Tours,” a painting in acrylic and oil on wooden panels that is as wide as the swim-up beach bar it depicts, he spares nobody: not the bulbous vacationers, flat black-and-white cutouts in patterns reminiscent of Victorian Era wallpaper; nor the native laborers, who conceal themselves behind horned masks; nor the resort owners, whose property, pink and tasteless, squats seaside with its windows closed. It is a beautiful day in the tropics, but Ramirez is showing us a picture of absolute unease — and we would recognize it as such even if it didn’t incorporate an actual animal skull. No one is communicating; no one shows his face. The scene is both idyllic and frighteningly closed down.

The exchange of money goes on as usual. In a white-gloved hand, the bartender holds a $20 American bill and an orchid. Tropical flowers are recurring symbols in Ramirez’s work, and they are all over “Cattleya,” a punchy solo exhibition that will occupy a pair of galleries on the second floor of the Newark Museum of Art until March 9. That the cattleya — a fuchsia orchid that is an opportunistic bloom — represents colonialism is clear, but in Ramirez’s work, everything is always more complicated than it originally seems. In his paintings, the cattleya, which is often cut and drooping, indicates a misunderstanding left to fester. It blossoms where words fail. The flower is beautiful, but it is also a mark of trauma, and an indicator that dialogue has broken down. The masks we wear are too thick, the walls are too heavy. The pain of cultural collision remains, but we’re not speaking to each other.

Sometimes the mute rage in “Cattleya” is distracting. Right off the bat, Ramirez slaps visitors with a site-specific installation designed to be unnerving: a taxidermy calf suspended amid a curtain of hanging chains. A few chains wrap around the animal. One chokes it. The piece expresses the horror of victimhood and helplessness, but that’s about all it does; it lacks the wide-screen ambivalence that animates the artist’s paintings. The sculpture of the “Caribaby” in a transparent Lucite crib, surrounded by red starfish and coconuts sheared in half, is similarly blunt, but benefits from Ramirez’s gift for rendering faces. His infant is wary, worried, staring out from beneath heavy, cocked eyebrows, lips pursed and stare straight, ready for whatever is coming, but not expecting anything good.

That knack for rendering posture and expression keeps Ramirez’s phantasmic paintings of human beings grounded in the present moment. The portraits in “Cattleya” are finely tuned: provocative, febrile, loaded with detail, and exactly as surreal as they need to be. Ramirez eyes are sometimes shut, lightly, as if his subjects are slipping into a dream. Usually, though, they are open, but they aren’t staring at anything in particular. Instead, they betray fear, exasperation, suspicion bordering on indignation. The typical Ramirez character is guarded and wounded; she is shooting you the sort of spare-me look of the person who has just been told something outrageous that she won’t dignify with a verbal response. Their protruding ears, however, are a swirl of color — they are like rainbow sherbet whirlpools, only they are more turbulent. It is as if those ears are overburdened with stimulation, huge cups brimming over with floral hues. The limbs of his characters are sinuous when they aren’t downright serpentine, and his subjects’ fingers and toes droop like water-starved petals. In one arresting painting, the hands of a young girl are replaced by upturned cattleyas.

Ramirez’s bodies are, above all, uncooperative: They don’t fit comfortably into their frames, their clothes, or our fields of vision. Traces of Picasso’s non-Euclidian body geometry are visible all over “Cattleya.” In the clever “Allegory of Liberation,” a mystery arm, disconnected from the subject, grabs one side of a leaky kitchen pot in which a quintet of crabs are swimming. Ramirez surrounds this painting of quotidian drama with a circle of coconuts and conch shells, and presents his brown-skinned character in a European-style dress that her physique rejects. Her shoulder straps float above a powerful neck, her eyes are shut, and like many of Ramirez’s Caribbean subjects, she’s got a pair of curved, wickedly pointed horns. Is she letting the crabs go, or bringing them to a boil? In “Cattleya,” the round-paneled portrait that gives this show its name, an exhausted-looking woman squeezes into a massive, puffy-sleeved blouse decked out in a floral pattern. Eyes of two different colors signify her dual identity, and the purple orchid in her hair has the gravity of a wound.

Though the people in these paintings are masked, occluded or otherwise concealed, every canvas contains an implicit plea for understanding. In Ramirez’s Caribbean (and, by extension, in his North America, too), everybody has been hurt by colonialism: the tourist and the laborer, the Spanish-speaker and the English, the Catholic and the follower of native faiths, the locked-up prisoner and the possessor of the key. Ramirez is asking us to recognize the damage done by colonialism, and he is challenging us to see the human beings behind the defenses they have erected.

A group show on view a few blocks from the Newark Museum of Art makes a similar request. New Jersey Institute of Technology gallery director Matthew Gosser has gathered work from eight North Jersey portraitists whose thinking doesn’t stop at the edge of the canvas. “Portrait as Statement” at the Halsey Arts Center provides an intriguing counterpoint to the Ramirez show — along with plenty of ideas of its own.

Some of it could have hung in “Cattleya” with no conceptual dissonance whatsoever. Brazilian-born, Newark-based artist Juno Zago superimposes a black-and-white image of himself atop reproductions of martial and devotional artwork from the Renaissance and European antiquity. He is not resistant or beleaguered, but he is surrounded, and from the look on his face, he knows no reprieve is coming. If only he could sail free of the past and its associations, like the subject of Shungaboy’s exciting piece — a stern, handsome, shirtless African-American man, hair flecked with gray, pointing at the open sea with the authority and focus of an admiral ordering an attack. Shungaboy’s subject is armed only by his wits, but is nevertheless an embodiment of confidence; Sofia Saleh, an artist who applies chewed bubblegum to her canvases, gives us a rifle-toting militant whose blank face and slumped shoulders suggest less than total dedication to his cause. “Are you happy when you are free? Or are you free when you are happy?” the artist asks, in a question aimed at her character as well as her audience.

This is a show of visual haymakers — sometimes literally. The prolific Jersey City artist and illustrator Cheryl Gross turns loose a pair of unambiguously feminist drawings of female boxers. Gross, an artist with energy to burn, festoons her fighters with crosshatched lines, zigzags, tiny dots, and circles of color that suggest flying droplets of sweat. Thomas John Carlson’s series of portraits of real-world politicians and dictators on the golf course feels similarly illustrative, and just as pointed. In his crisp, vivid, daylight-clear style, he calls out cults of personality, the sycophancy of supporters, and the strange zero-sum game that the scramble for power has become.

A neighboring piece is weird, wild, and pleasantly megalomaniacal: a self-portrait that includes six representations of Carlson’s head. He imagines himself buried like a mole, as a sessile bust sleeping with the fishes in a market, as a watery flotation device and a green fruit of a seaside tree, and as the sun, beaming (or leering?) from the middle of the sky.

Carlson’s statement feels like a riddle. So do a pair of enigmatic oils on canvas by Raisa Nosova, a portrait-maker whose works have the immediacy of street art. Nosova depicts a girl who contains the city: a youth in a dress with her back turned to us, peering out into a hot orange expanse. Somewhere inside her consciousness, it is night, and the electric lights of the town are imprinted on her shoulders and neck. There is a white umbrella in the foreground, but it is folded up. She doesn’t need protection where she is going — she is carrying the energy of urban spaces with her.

Nosova’s other character is a darker study. We see nothing but his head and upper torso as he crouches, catlike, at the edge of a swamp. His reflection is imprinted on the obsidian surface of the water. There is a strong sense that we have intruded on something private and sacrosanct, and that this feral human is the carrier of a secret.

Should you like to try to puzzle it out, “Portrait as Statement” will be on view at Halsey Arts until Sept 6; visit the gallery’s Facebook page.