Wifredo Lam Analysis

Wifredo Lam is one of the most renowned painter from Cuba and The Jungle remains his best known work and an important painting in the history of not only Latin American art, but the history twentieth-century modernism. In the 1920s and 30s, Lam was in Madrid and Paris, but in 1941 as Europe was engulfed by war, he returned to his native country. Though he would leave Cuba again for Europe after the war, key elements within his artistic practice intersected during this period: Lam’s consciousness of Cuba’s socio-economic realities; his artistic formation in Europe under the influence of Surrealism; and his re-acquaintance with Afro-Caribbean culture. This remarkable collision resulted in the artist’s most notable work, The Jungle.

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The cluster of enigmatic faces, limbs, and sugarcane crowd a canvas that is nearly an 8 foot square. Lam’s bold painting is a game of perception. The artist unsystematically constructs figures from a assortment of crescent-shaped faces, rounded backsides; malleable arms and legs; and flat, cloddish hands and feet. When these figures are put together the idea of a funhouse mirror reflection is projected. The disproportion among the shapes generates an uneasy balance between the composition’s denser top and more open bottom—there are not enough feet and legs to support the upper half of the painting, which seems on the verge of toppling over. Another important element within Lam’s perception is how he places the figures within an unorthodox landscape. Lam’s landscape does not include the typical elements of a horizon line, sky or wide view; instead this is a tight, directionless snapshot, with only the faintest sense of the
relations in Cuba. The jungle like remake of the Sugarcane fields present an image of distance and an illusion of naturally occurring. When in fact the sugarcane fields are not that far from these tourism posters that depict this island and are another way for the US to profit from this small Island. In addition the unproptionally top to bottom clutter is a way to identify with the struggle of a having a heavy load to care on such a small nation. Create profit for the US while also supplying their self with nessary resources to survie.

When speaking of Lam’s Identiy through the Jungle we most also include his time spent in paris during the interwar period. During his stay Lam befriended Surrealists, whose influence can be seen in man of his work. Surrealists aimed to release the unconscious mind suppressed, they believed, by the rational in order to achieve another reality. In art, the comparison of irrational images reveal a “super-reality,” or “sur-reality.” In Lam’s work, an other-worldly atmosphere emerges from the constant shifting taking place among the figures; they are at once human, animal, organic, and mystical.
This metamorphosis among the figures is also related to Lam’s interest in Afro-Caribbean culture. Once again showing the identiy picked up when he resettled in Cuba. During this time, began to integrate symbols from Santería, an Afro-Cuban religion that mixes African