By Joel Lang
The City Lights Gallery in Bridgeport is giving the Chilean-born artist Carlos Bautista Biernnay his first solo exhibit in the U.S.
Biernnay himself, who now lives half the year in Hamden, says his work combines the ecclesiastic and the comic. Gallery Director Suzanne Kachmar, who has included him in recent group shows, says he can be an absurdist, combining the whimsical and the macabre.
She also says his large tapestries, which dominate the exhibit, are so packed with visual information she can barely stop looking at them. One story they tell is of Bierrnay’s own life.
Coming first in his personal chronology is a tapestry that shows two men sitting shoulder to shoulder on a park bench. Both are dressed in loud style. One wears a boldly striped suit, while the other sports a blue suit with big white polka dots. In another context, they might be vaudeville performers between acts. But their faces are somber, even if they are patchworks of color. The context is loss and reunion.
The man in pinstripes is Biernnay’s father, who died in an accident soon after Biernnay was born. The man in the polka dot suit is the artist himself.
“I never met him. How did he walk? How did he talk? All my life I had the necessity to meet him,” says Biernnay, for whom English is a second language. “Here, I’m having a conversation with him. I get to know him. I just feel so happy.”
He says he titled the piece “Sunday in the Park with George,” not as a reference to the painter Georges Seurat or the Broadway musical that followed, but because his father’s name was Jorge. But what about the polka dots? Did Biernnay have Seurat’s pointillism in mind. “Oh, no. I just love polka dots,” he says.
Next in the chronology comes “Scream and Shout,” the large tapestry that gives the exhibit its title. This time Biernnay appears as a monstrous puppeteer looming over a New York City skyline. One hand manipulates a skeleton, the other a sad-faced Pinocchio. A paper airplane crashes into one side of the puppeteer’s head, while a red-winged angel shelters between his legs.
“Scream and Shout” refers to two life-altering events, for Biernnay and millions of others, that occurred on the same date, Sept. 11. In 1973, a coup brought the dictator Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile. Then in 2001, it was the terrorist attack on Biernnay’s adopted country.
“That’s me,” he says of the puppeteer. “For me that day, 9/11 in 1973, it happened again. I feel like I have to scream.”
He says he cast himself as the puppet master because he refuses to see himself as an innocent bystander to shattering events. “I think it’s part of who I am. I represent what I believe about the politics. The puppet strings show the power: the victims of power and the power of the manipulator.”
Kachmar points out that the puppet master wears a broken heart on the outside of his chest and that even he is controlled by a hook screwed into the top of his head. “That’s my connection to God,” Biernnay says.
He first came to the U.S. for formal art training. He concentrated in painting at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and weaving at the Portland Fiber Gallery. But he says his first training began as a child, observing his mother, grandmother and aunts make what they needed during the Pinochet regime. “They were doing everything: clothes, sheets for the bed, pillows,” he says. “I had my inspiration from them.”
In 2010, he returned to Chile for more schooling. While there he says, “I tried to find a connection with my past. So I started sewing.” Now, his tapestries are sewn mostly by machine and assembled from fabric remnants and oddments he may find in flea markets. His willingness to mix and match with what’s at hand lends a Latin folk art flavor to his work. Skeletons abound, as in Day of the Dead celebrations.
“In my life, I have a lot of connections with the dead. It’s always around me. So I’m not scared about it. I live with it. It’s part of life,” he says. He also revels in his freedom of choice. “You know, when I work I don’t have control. I do what I have to do,” he says.
Biernnay seems to have poured all his impulses into the wall-filling tapestry opposite the City Lights’ entrance titled “Fiesta de la Lola.” He says it is a celebration of his own same sex wedding. What a wedding it just have been! As Kachmar might say, it’s loaded with information.
At first, it appears the skeletal robot in the center of the tapestry must be the groom. Seated magisterially in a throne chair, he rests a loving hand on a kneeling, lipsticked figure who wears a dark veil. But then you notice the supposed groom also is veiled and wears polka-dotted ,high heeled shoes.
There are five or six wedding guests, all fashioned from such a profusion of cut and sewn materials that they somehow appear naked and colorfully armored at the same time. A freefloating bass player in the tapestry’s title character. He says he and his husband in Chile have been separated by the pandemic.
Altogether, there are half dozen or so large tapestries in the exhibit. Some are explicitly religious like Biernnay’s version of “The Last Supper.” Raised Catholic during the materialistic Pinochet regime, he has made it satirical. The faceless disciples feast on fast food, while dollar nails fall off the table and crabs scrabble on the floor. Again, he has included himself, pointing to the smaller figure fourth from the right. “I’m always part of the crime,” he says.
The exhibit, timed to Hispanic heritage month, runs to Oct. 31. The gallery can be visited without appointment during regular hours at 265 Golden Hill St.