Byline: Annabel Osberg

Born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1982, María Berrío moved to the U.S. at the age of 18. Childhood recollections of exploring her family’s rural mountainside farm figure prominently in her large-scale collages depicting female figures inside vacant interiors and illusory landscapes. Appearing as symbolic daydreams of her motherland, the New York-based artist’s mythical scenes combine autobiography with ambiguous folkloric references from South America and beyond.

With an emphasis on pattern recalling that of Gustav Klimt, Berrío’s pictures are suffused with idealism tempered by mystery. Beautifully attired women with sober, dreamy miens inhabit otherworldly spaces where the patterns of their floral clothing alternately coincide and contrast with surrounding foliage, terrain and decor. Diverse motifs, including rituals of indigenous peoples of Colombia, betoken the multiculturalism of South America and the U.S.; yet these appear so general that anyone could relate to them.

Much of Berrío’s work lends visionary buoyancy to the sense of dislocation often faced by immigrants. The picture after which her Kohn Gallery exhibition was titled, A Cloud’s Roots (2018), portrays two girls leaning against the trunk of a fanciful tree modeled after an actual species, the dragon blood tree endemic to Socotra, an island off the coast of Yemen. Berrío posits that species, finely adapted for survival in a hardscrabble arid habitat, as an allegory of the figures’ potential for resiliently putting down roots in whatever harsh conditions they might encounter. The girls pose determinedly; but behind the tree is nothing but darkening firmament that seems to indicate an uncertain future.

Pieced together of painted paper and some printed material on canvas, Berrío’s works are technically collages; yet her imaginative compositions are unified so harmoniously that each canvas has the presence of a painting. Impact is added by the unexpected textures of her piebald materials: walls are suggested by wrinkled paper glued to canvas; skies are evoked by broad passages of watercolor-stained Japanese paper. A remarkable sense of depth unfolds as you approach each collage and stark expanses give way to minute areas of detail, such as a tiny framed portrait atop the nightstand in Flower Mirror Water Moon (2019). The patchwork composition of these scenes seems an apt metaphor for a transplant’s reconceived memories and restructured notions of belonging. 

In fact, Berrío’s portrayed spaces are so exquisitely evocative that occasionally her relatively stiff figures fall flat in comparison. More development of her animal and human protagonists would have better served The Paradise of Others (2019), where an expressionless group of children and ibises detracts from the fascination of a strange house on stilts, denuded forest and pot of livid roses.

Anemochory (2019), whose title refers to seed dispersal by wind, sparkles with quiet emotion. Dragon blood trees reappear in the background of this absorbing scene portraying two figures improbably marooned in an outdoor setting. One disheveled girl is flopped width-wise on a four-poster bed as though impatiently exhausted by the interminable wait for something interesting to happen. On a nearby chair, her more neatly garbed companion sits gingerly holding a large butterfly, her sidelong gaze betraying wistfulness. The children’s nervous sense of anticipation is palpable: Like dandelion seeds, where will they go?

Lebanon-born, Los Angeles-based painter and sculptor Rabbia Sukkarieh regards her art as a means of transmuting a traumatic past. Having experienced the 1975–90 Lebanese Civil War, she creates ambiguous abstractions combining tokens of comfort with elements relating to her memories of internecine strife. Sukkarieh’s paintings, drawings and sculptures in “DARKEVENTWHITEHORIZON,” at Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art, are rooted in personal associations yet remain agape to viewers’ interpretation.

Her largest paintings, Sabra 1 (2016) and Sabra 2 (2017), feature weblike networks of black, white, red, orange, green and yellow splotches that coalesce, at a considerable distance, into expansive compositions. As one approaches either painting, its inscrutable pictorial structure disintegrates into mosaics of irregularly mottled patterns whose constituent shapes vaguely resemble those of camouflage print. These enigmatic abstractions were partly derived from scenes of the notorious 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres in West Beirut, which had occurred near Sukkarieh’s home. With her representational sources layered and transformed to the point of unrecognizability, the finished paintings betray little indication of their horror-laced origins. Thus, the artist has symbolically abstracted the bloodbath into oblivion; and with it, perhaps, her pain of its memory.

While Sukkarieh refers to her two-dimensional works as expressionistic, her premeditated methods diverge from the dashing brushwork generally associated with Expressionism. Her strokes are smooth and studied; her compositions are carefully planned. One can sense the artist searching for catharsis through contemplative repetition. This interpretation is substantiated by Sukkarieh’s emphasis on having mixed her hues from only four paint tubes, including red and yellow, which she describes as Buddhist healing colors. Similarly, a slew of drawings portray unnameable dark forms agglomerated from meshes of copious inessential detail. In these, her assiduous movement of pencil over and across paper seems to stem from a Zen-like preoccupation with reiterative activity.

Most expressive are her woolen sculptures, whose morphologies often echo the shapes in her drawings. Many appear vaguely corporal. Untitled (2017) is a clot of rusty reddish-brown wool bearing gaping holes suggesting wounds or bodily orifices. The puffy, bulbous arch comprising White Hole (2018) is amassed of black wool whose fluffy surface texture brings to mind cotton candy spun of charcoal. Sukkarieh’s titular reference to a white hole—a spacetime theory bearing negligible relation to the subject at hand—distracts from this sculpture’s real-life presence, which evokes billowing towers of smoke or the gloomy entrance to a lava cavern.

Wool traditionally bears comforting associations of softness and warmth, but here it appears somber and eerie. Sukkarieh’s use of wool relates to childhood recollections of her grandmother weaving rugs and her mother knitting sweaters with the family gathered around a stove during winters in her hometown of Baalbek. Yet she also says it now reminds her of the hair of innocent souls having lost their lives in bloody frays. Such dichotomous symbolism affirms that even one’s fondest memories can be tainted by the horrors of war. Sukkarieh’s work seems driven by her conviction that art can help untangle emotions jumbled by trauma.