Emma Reyes

Born in Bogotá in 1919, Reyes spent her early years in poverty before being taken in by the convent of the Auxiliary Sisters – an upbringing that intensely shaped her worldview, and, ultimately, her artistic practice. ‘I lived in a world of dreams and abstraction,’ she later recalled, ‘because we referred to everything that happened outside the convent as “the world”, as though we lived on another planet’.¹ Around the age of 18, she escaped the convent and travelled around South America, later settling in Buenos Aires, where a chance encounter with an exhibition by Raúl Soldi marked the origins of her painting practice – the first time, by her own account, she had ever seen a painting at all. In 1947, a scholarship from the Roncoroni Foundation took her to the André Lhote Academy in Paris, where she studied under the French painter and Cubist theorist, Lhote, and encountered the contemporary Parisian art scene, recognising, in the portraits of Pablo Picasso, echoes of Mesoamerican forms which she would later revisit in her own work, animated with a vitality she felt Western painting had drained from them. Following a job illustrating educational books for the Latin American People's Library for UNESCO in Washington, DC, Reyes moved to Mexico City, where she assisted Diego Rivera and helped organise Frida Kahlo’s final exhibition in 1953 at Lola Álvarez Bravo’s gallery. During a six-year stay in Rome, from 1954 to 1960, Reyes moved in the circles of the Futurist artist Enrico Prampolini and the writer Alberto Moravia, and began work on her first series, ‘Monsters’. Her travels found their final resting place in France, where she became a naturalised citizen, and divided her later years between Bordeaux and Périgueux. 

Initiated in Bordeaux in 1990 and continued until her death, Reyes’s ‘Masks’ series are studies of transformation, alter-egos and shifting identity – less an inventory of faces than portraits of the human soul. In Untitled (1998), curvilinear forms in vegetal green, yellow and brown overlap and interlock, as though slotting in and out of a human form. Elsewhere, in Untitled (1990), faces appear entwined within a web of graphic lines that conjure a map of discrete, yet interconnected enclaves. Rendered in Reyes’s typical striated style and bright, unmodulated colour, the works in this series draw on a wide field of reference, from ritual masks found across early civilisations to organic patterns, perhaps the cellular structure of a honeycomb or the branching veins of a root system. Referring, in part, to pre-Columbian artefacts – from the decorative motifs found in Maya and Aztec ornaments, to the giant Olmec heads in basalt she encountered on her travels through Mexico – her work was marked as much by external points of reference as by memory and personal experience.

Reyes had already begun her exploration of the human years earlier, in her ‘Imaginary Portraits’, a series of invented figures drawn from memory. Inspired by the people she encountered, her travels through South America and the indigenous communities she met along the way, the works consider a shared human condition and the myriad possibilities of what pictorial form a ‘person’ might take. In Untitled (1976), a hooded figure emerges from a hatched chambray-blue ground and peers out beyond the picture plane. Meanwhile, two untitled works on paper from the series (both 1973–78), created with scoring and ink, appear to excavate fossilised images lying deep within the textured rag paper. Both Reyes’s use of the line and her unique sensitivity are traceable to her embroidery training at the convent, where she learned ‘the secrets and tricks of each kind of cloth, each kind of stitching, the uses of each thread’.² Wrought with a filigree-like line, these ink on paper works might appear heavily schematic, yet Reyes never produced preparatory drawings, working instead directly from memory, each line finding its way instinctively into the next. Overturning painterly traditions issuing out of Western notions of the subject in portraiture, Reyes arrived at a human form that exceeds mere likeness, opting instead to render an idea of the human, one that is expansive and speculative.

In her ‘Flowers, Fruits and Vegetables’ series, Reyes rethinks another trope of Western painting. In Untitled (1989) and Untitled (1990), tropical fruits and vegetables are liberated from the status of the mere still life, a term Reyes firmly resisted. Each vein of a leaf or blistering tubercle of a fruit is captured in such detail – often enlarged so that it continues far beyond the pictorial frame – which could only result from her cultivating ‘an intimacy with the object’.³

Across her practice, subjects are granted the same weight of attention: a face rendered at once human and inhuman, a vegetable observed with the same close scrutiny as a portrait. Taken together, these bodies of work decentre the human, setting it level with, and answerable to, the contours of the world around it. Where Western painting has traditionally bound its subjects within the discrete edges of the individual, Reyes’s figures spill past them, entangled within a wider web of relation where all organic life is held together by her ever-present line. Through this modest unit, Reyes conjures an expansive worldview, in which the interconnectedness of all living things prevails, and the magic of this representation is revealed – ‘I do not paint my pictures,’ she once said, ‘I write them’.⁴