By Cila Warncke
The Cross: a cry of heartbreak and pean to redemption.
Lolo painted The Cross years ago amidst a separation . She threw the canvas on the floor and strew it with paint. Her fine, strong hands snarled and clawed into shape its rough outlines. When she placed it on an easel a man’s face emerged.
“There is a place between conscious and subconscious,” she says, surveying The Cross from a respectful distance. “There you can touch everything you have lived.”
Art born from this space transcends aesthetics. The Cross represents the apotheosis of anguish. Life suffocated by the weight judgement; a reluctant sacrifice — “not my will, but thine be done”. In this cruel space innocence and guilt are irrelevant. One suffers for countless sins of ommission and commison. Loss, isolation, and alienation.
When the paint was part dry Lolo scattered it with fistfuls of sand. She scrubbed some coarse grains into the canvas, allowed gravity to drag others. Ghostlike, the cross appeared in negative.
“A cross is a warning,” Lolo notes. “It can mean ‘stop’, or mark an error.”
The top of Lolo’s cross twirls, seems to flicker like a torch. If one side of The Cross is agony the other is ecstasy. It is rebirth. Hallelujah. It is a spike in the heart of a vampire. It is dawnbreak on the darkest night of the soul. Oh, holy joy.
“We keep drooling over our pain,” says Lolo, hazel eyes reflecting the subtle contours of The Cross. “The Bible says Jesus took our pain. He took it all off our shoulders. Stop moaning.”
Equal part astute comment on the inevitability of loss and celebration of the life after the death of
a relationship, The Cross evokes and transcends the fundamental myth of Western culture while shimmering with profound humanity.
The Cross waited years to be unveiled. Released in the heat of heartbreak, it would have been unfinished. Now, its corporeal texture is imbued with the vitality of a resurrected spirit. Alive with symbolism and fraught with imagery of life, death, truth and controversy, it is a work of art that will continue to reveal new aspects over time and elicit emotions both dark and light.
I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen. Revelation 1:18