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Cuban-born artist
Abelardo Merell uses old-fashioned camera
obscura to show the world in ways that often
leave you speechless
By Elisa Turner, elisaturn@aol.com.
Posted on Sun, Jan. 25, 2004 in The Miami
Herald.
Abelardo
Morell's students at the Massachusetts
College of Art in Boston are digital savants,
members of the generation born double-clicking
a computer mouse with one hand and channel-surfing
with the other.
And yet, every year, when Morell turns
off the light in a classroom where windows
are draped in black, so that only a slim
beam of light shines through a small hole,
his students become uncharacteristically
still. A few jaws are sure to drop. They
watch while moving pictures, forming an
exact but upside-down record of the view
from their window, appear on the classroom
wall.
The camera obscura -- a darkened room that's
a primitive predecessor of the modern camera
-- has once again worked its age-old magic.
These 21st century kids are amazed by the
simplicity of an image-making device so
ancient it was familiar to Aristotle and
prized by Renaissance masters.
''They can actually see Huntington Avenue
with taxis upside-down and people walking
on the street. It's incredible what kind
of a hush the room gets,'' says Morell,
an acclaimed artist whose elegantly poetic
and playful black-and-white photographs,
many made with the camera obscura, are now
on view at the Patricia and Philip Frost
Art Museum at Florida International University.
Some in the Frost exhibit include images
of streets and homes musty with 1950s interior
décor, part of a series the Cuban-born
artist shot in Havana two years ago during
his first visit to the island since leaving
as a 14-year-old in 1962.
Other photographs in the show have settings
that might seem initially more familiar
to his students: the silvery spire from
the Empire State Building projected on the
bed in a hotel room, even though the building
in this context comes to resemble an errant
snake haunting someone's bedcovers.
Either way, the camera obscura offers an
eye-opening experience to the jaded.
''These cynical students grew up with Nintendo,
and they are actually awed,'' he says. "It's
one of my big pleasures of teaching, getting
people to be actually awed by a sight.''
That pleasure is extra sweet, he adds,
because there's no technology involved,
only the physics of light. ''It happens
with the most minimum of means,'' he says.
"One has to wonder why something this
perfect is so natural.''
In a brief video at the Frost Museum, which
explains how beams of light naturally reflect
an inverted image through the tiny hole
of a camera obscura, the artist shares his
own wonder.
Usually hidden images of the real world
outside, he says, become ''almost religiously''
visible. ''It's not something one invents,''
he adds.
BACK TO THE CAMERA
The camera obscura remains, well, pretty
obscure to most people, as Morell discovered
when he began experimenting with it in 1991.
At that time, many in the art world were
starting to write off traditional photography
in favor of photographic images that could
be manipulated with digital innovations.
Morell wanted to draw his students back
to the camera's elemental capacity for mystery
and delight.
So began a series of work that has since
become Morell's signature and helped elevate
his art into a prestigious slew of exhibits
and museum collections in this country and
in Europe, including New York's Metropolitan
Museum of Art and London's Victoria and
Albert Museum. His art also is the subject
of two books coming out this year, as well
as a documentary.
But as the Frost Museum show demonstrates,
his work isn't just about turning off the
lights. Frost assistant curator Elizabeth
Cerejido has put together a thoughtful survey
of 53 gelatin silver prints, in luscious
tones spanning a sterling silver white to
inky black, from 1991 to 2003. They bring
together his oddly architectural photographs
of art books and money. There's also a series
based on paintings in Boston's Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum and a charming group
revisiting classic illustrations for Lewis
Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Morell's photographs of books are the best
of these additional series. Velum pages
tinted in gold, stacked and seen close-up
like Renaissance towers, or roiled by accidental
dampness are so fabulously textured that
the imaginary world of reading swims toward
our eye with a generous physicality.
Such images somehow make the reading of
pages -- laden with words, maps or pictures
of paintings by Edward Hopper and Leonardo
da Vinci -- an art in itself.
Not surprising. Morrell is a veteran at
reading the visual and the verbal. His photographs
of rooms often make the rooms seem like
open books, but huge coffee table books
laid open with exquisite, terrifying and
dwarfing detail.
YOUNG AUDIENCE
Morell's Jan. 16 talk about his work at
FIU drew a standing-room-only crowd of 500.
The crowd included a number of younger artists
and photographers, Cerejido said. ''They
were very excited to see the work,'' she
says. "I think it reaffirms what photography
is about, and maybe they find that refreshing.''
In Morell's photographs created with a
camera obscura, interior and exterior physical
realms slip into each other with bizarre,
dream-like juxtapositions.
One of his earliest was shot inside his
son Brady's bedroom in 1992. Things cheerful
and menacing mingle together so much that
it's hard to tell fun from the foreboding.
In this ''inside look'' at the porous nature
of contemporary childhood, where shelters
are thin, a brazen toy dinosaur lumbers
right-side up in front of the camera obscura's
image of cozy tree-lined suburban streets
projected upside-down on the boy's bedroom
wall.
In another, the past and present merge
and startle, especially in the series from
Cuba. The current reality of Havana's crumbling
grand hotels, graceful colonial arcades
and squalid alleys is the overturned backdrop
for a bureau set with perfume bottles and
an old portrait of a vintage beauty with
wavy, brushed-back hair. A folded ironing
board in the room lines up next to the upside-down
hotels, so that, as vertical symbols of
tedium and grandeur, they are sadly parallel.
The images are wonderfully, resolutely
grounded in reality. But they are also luminous
metaphors for the way our minds work double-time,
seeing taxis on the street and projected
fantasies in our mind's eye.
After his family settled in New York, Morell
won a scholarship to the frigid campus of
Bowdoin College in Maine. At college, he
was still refining his mastery of English
and the idioms of a northern culture.
''It was a huge transition. It was hard,''
he remembers. "In my talk, I said something
about imagining Cuba, then Brunswick, Maine,
and then you have the makings of an artist.
It's the shock of the new and finding ways
to deal with the strangeness and change.''
A class in photography changed things all
the more. ''It was as if I had just discovered
a new language and now that I could finally
talk, no one could shut me up.'' Not even,
he later learned, the computer-literate.
Elisa Turner is The Herald's art critic.
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