Luis Gonzalez Palma. “Mesa Rio,” 2009 digital print on transparency, gold leaf on board, red paper
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As the veteran globalized A-list Guatemalan photographer Luis Gonzalez Palma enters his late fifties, he persists in his lifelong struggle to overcome the sadness in his heart through enduring a long series of unsuccessful attempts to affirm life fully by expressing his agonies and contradictions in his photo-art. His latest body of work, “Mobius,” leaves him where he started, only, as always through each iteration, more intense and more accomplished. Still posing native Guatemalan models for deep gold-toned portraits on which he sometimes strategically and elegantly paints, and setting up telling magical-realist scenarios, Gonzalez Palma has simplified his representations of his subjects by taking head shots of them that accentuate the moods and expressive emotions with which he endows them. The mood here, the same in all thirteen images, does not constitute a “look” that plays along the surface of the print, but one that cuts intensely, individualizing and particularizing in each case. A young woman looks straight on, too intimate and close for comfort; her eyes are wide and burning, her eyebrows arched, and her lips shut, but not so tightly as to mask vulnerability and pain. She is the most achieved of the photographer’s subjects, but all the others show the same failed effort to keep back the tears. Vertical painted red lines down the sides of a portrait of another young woman make the point more explicit. In the only scenario in the exhibit, a dining table, with its white tablecloth askew and an empty wine glass atop it, sits in the middle of a stream in a forest. The stream of life proceeds, the lonely libation has been drunk, and there is as yet no redemption. (Michael Weinstein)
Through October 31 at Schneider Gallery, 230 West Superior
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