By
JOHN SCHERBER
BEWARE WHAT
YOU HANG ON YOUR WALLS
I used to go Santa Fe for a few days every year.
Several times I thought I saw the writer Tony Hillerman on the street––I was
working my way with gusto through the many volumes of his New Mexico mysteries at
the time. Since I moved to México, I haven’t been back, and I miss that town. Hillerman
is gone now, and I miss him too. He created his own oblique angle on the
mystery genre when he combined it with Native American lore and tradition.
Canyon Road is the center of gallery activity in
Santa Fe, and I trek through many of them each time I visit. One of my favorite
galleries on Canyon Road is Turner Carroll. They represent a painter who is
tilted just a few degrees off true vertical, Georges Mazilu. That’s what I like
most about him.
Mazilu is a Romanian who has lived and worked in
Paris for many years, painting in acrylic on fine-textured linen canvas. His
style appears to derive from the old masters of the bizarre, like Bosch or van
Eyck. He’s well established and his
paintings are not cheap. I think of his subjects as about 94% human, but I sense
that’s close enough for him, since he inhabits an off-center world that creates
the artistic parallel to Hillerman’s in the mystery genre, except that Mazilu’s
people exist in a culture––perhaps a universe––entirely of his own devising.
Mazilu’s figures wear what I think of as medieval
cast-offs. They appear to be worn leather or other skins, tattered wool or
battered brass armor too thin to deflect more than a half-hearted thrust. Dogs
are frequently present, often with improvised prosthetic devices. Are they
veterans of the canine wars?
On one visit, I could stand it no longer, and I
bought a Mazilu painting. The larger ones were beyond my budget, but in Harlequin with Red Beret, I found a
piece I could handle. The harlequin is a melancholy figure, distant, hairless,
painted as a portrait bust. His long nose, more graceful than aggressive, hugs
the contour of his face. The ‘beret’ is a triangle of rusty red felt, riveted
to his head. Riveted. He couldn’t
lose it in a high wind.
Now, in my tall-ceilinged Mexican house in San
Miguel, it hangs over a cherry lowboy of Chippendale design that I made myself
in 1973. Almost an antique now, it has developed its own mellow patina. When I
sit at the table in our dining room, the harlequin looks back in my general direction––but
not into my eyes, because Mazilu’s people exist in their own melancholy separation,
avoiding a direct gaze. Yet, day after day, I look back at him.
And in looking back at him, over time I began to
wonder what world he inhabits, because at Turner Carroll, I have already seen many
others like my harlequin. They would have their own families, society, and culture.
They must have evolved all these things over time, because the canvas that
portrays him looks old––he might be an ancestor. Possibly, they would have even
created their own religion––or excluded it from their lives entirely. Looking
as they do, they would not be able to circulate freely among us. They couldn’t
bear our need to point a finger, to discriminate, to define them as the other.
I realized that Mazilu has done what every
fiction writer is compelled to do, or die trying––create an alternative world,
one that his viewers, even when it made them uncomfortable, would never want to
leave. This, above all, is what I love about Georges Mazilu.
So I took a modest step, one that writers take
all the time. I created my own version of that harlequin’s world. I never
thought it was a world that Georges Mazilu would recognize. But his work has,
as we say in fiction, some air in it.
Air is the space to place your own interpretation
on what you see or read, to add to it, to extend it. Within the larger
framework and emotional structure of a fictional work, you, the reader, can unconsciously
insert the small-scale things you know in your heart to be true, because you
have either lived each of them, or would like to.
Some would say the world I created for my harlequin
is sinister. He and his friends have the ability to emerge, to break free from
their canvases, and interact with us on the ground in ways we’re never ready
for.
Beware what art you hang on your walls.
You will see
what I mean in The Devil’s Workshop.
Reading from it at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference brought a standing
ovation. Try a sample from my website:
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