Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) Exhibit : Gleanings

“Painting is my vehicle of transit. I don’t always know where I am going or what it means”

I came across Leonora Carrington when I discovered her Major Arcana, put out by Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq. She created the 22 images in the 1950s, which were rediscovered following her 2011 death and exhibited for the first time for her centennial exhibition 2018. Soon the deck was published. But with the rush on the much sought after images, they vanished from print before I could procure myself a set. An expanded edition by Fulgur Press is presently out of my pocket’s reach.

"Sun," Leonora Carrington, Tarot Major Arcana, 1950s

"Star," Leonora Carrington, Tarot Major Arcana, 1950s

So when Paris’s Musée du Luxembourg announced a Carrington exhibit I went as much to discover her as to hope the deck might be found in their giftshop (it was not, but of the choice of three, there was the deck I got myself as consolation). The show’s dates included Museum Night, Europe’s festival celebrating the different consecrated houses of art with performances and poetry. Paulina Ruiz Carballido and Stéphanie Janaina, Franco-Mexican dancers, animated its spaces with Tu’un Savi (Mixtec) cosmological choreography perfectly rhyming their “ironic witchcraft” with Carrington’s personal stripe of hallucinatory esotericism.

"Ballerina II (Mythical Figure)," Leonora Carrington,  1954,

I fell completely in love, spellbound by her images, each one a step further (down or up?) into this world, these worlds, hers, immersion into a psyche both strange and familiar.

What could I not love, as I entered further into her world, the world of a girl growing up in a Neo-Gothic pile amidst her nanny’s Celtic tales of magic, thrown out of Catholic schools as a child, whose eventual presentation at court inspired her story of a hyena who learns to walk in heels to go to a ball in the place of her friend, because the hyena can at least make small talk.

"Oink (They Shall Behold Thine Eyes)," Leonora Carrington, 1959

Then came the psychotic break in franquist Spain after a brutal sexual assault and an internment in an asylum where worse awaited. She escaped, cannily and by the skin of her teeth, slipping away and marrying a diplomat/poet Renato Leduc, who brought her safely to Mexico, under whose sun and stories she lived the rest of her life

From the very start, with her adolescent creation of the Sisters of the Moon,

"Fantasia (Sisters of the Moon)," Leonora Carrington, 1935

 her images speak to a religion more ancient, of deep, high magic and priestesses. With the years, they became profoundly immersed in Kabbalah, alchemy, tarot, Mayan mysticism and other wisdoms. The canvases are punctuated by muscular, psychopomp horses, hyenas with their uncanny laughter, and birds, those bright creatures of flight and shadows that fall between realms. She serves us kitchens in which the athanor is as familiar as a stove, eggs that are eggs and more than eggs. These paintings are what Eve learned from tree, fruit, snake, all told in oneiromantic logic.

"Queria ser pajaro" Leonora Carrington, 1960

I took no pictures, could not, so enthralled was I, I couldn’t take myself out of discovery after discovery to do so. Or rather I took one picture, in the alchemical cuisine section a detail from "A Warning to Mother," (1973)  or what I like to call "Alchemikitty."

  

Since then, I have been reading her complete short stories, each a strong chocolate to savor, with hard liquor filling them. Every one is a revelation, and from feverdream to phantasmagoria, none disappoint

He threw off his clothes, dropping his gown of feathers to the ground. He was naked. If the feathers were white, his body was blindingly so. I think he must have painted it with some phosphorescent paint, for it shone like the moon. He wore blue stockings with red stripes. “Am I beautiful?” he asked. “They say I am.” I was too fascinated to reply.