At once a sensory organ and a seemingly transparent screen, the eye has captivated artists for centuries—none more obsessively, perhaps, than the Guatemalan painter and printmaker of Palestinian descent, Rodolfo Abularach. More than a dozen of his examinations of this subject are now on view at David Nolan Gallery, and they convey unmistakably that the eye gives access not simply to the external world but, more profoundly, to the ones within us and beyond.
Remembered today as one of Latin America’s most distinguished masters, Abularach began teaching drawing and painting at Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Guatemala’s official fine arts academy, in the late 1950s. During this time, he travelled frequently to the United States on scholarships—initially to study engraving at the Arts Students League in New York, then as a recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships—and eventually relocated there, remaining for forty years. It was during a residency at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1966 that he first discovered his subject. As his friend, the artist Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer, recalls in the monograph published with this exhibition, the eye first surfaced to Abularach as “circles with a curved line below, a soft and symbolic trace … as precise as the rhythm of breathwork in meditation.”
The first full-scale gallery solo presentation of the artist in New York, A Cosmic Vision tracks the morphology of this motif (and that of the volcano, as we shall see) as it evolves from abstract, radiating spheres that allude to the cosmic symbolism of light and darkness (such as 2 Círculos - Armonía y Contraste (2 Circles - Harmony and Contrast) (1965) to naturalistic depictions of the late 1970s and 1980s that show the eyebrow, eyelashes, and eyelid in addition to the usual isolated eye (such as Olimpia [1979]). A selection of monochrome ink drawings in particular demonstrate Abularach’s technical prowess: there is no definite outline but only tight, intricate cross-hatching that, through subtly varying density, builds up the illusion of form and volume—often infinitely expanding or, at the pupil, receding into a dark void.
Abularach’s sfumato technique was inspired by Mayan stelae, ancient stone monuments of divine kingship. While mid-century Abstract Expressionists like Adolph Gottlieb extracted universal content from their low relief carvings, Abularach venerated the materiality of the stelae’s surfaces: from them, when lit, emerged to him a vivid, mystical “apparition,” as he put it, whereby “forms float in space, almost suspended by the light.” Emulating this effect, he too learned to work with light, in ink and oil and acrylic paints, creating pieces with an outsized aura, like a “luminous apparition through a doorway.” A practitioner of Tantric Buddhism and meditation, Abularach often worked at night in a trance-like state, which gives the work an additional hypnotic power.
It is the pieces from the mid-sixties to mid-seventies—falling between the most abstract and the most naturalistic—that are the most memorable. Here, the eyelids are so outstretched that the pupil, iris, and sclera appear as perfect spheres. In Energía No. 6 - Emanación de Energía (Energy No. 6 - Emanation of Energy) (1965), the eye becomes interchangeable with the sun, its spidery veins rendered as light rays. Indeed, long before Abularach formally adopted the eye motif, he was already familiar with its significance in Mesoamerican art and architecture, where it could stand for the sun, the moon, and the stars. As in the Popol Vuh—the K’iche’ Mayan book of creation, known as the “instrument of sight or vision”—seeing is associated with light, power, and divine creation.
This idea finds its most literal expression in Cosmico No. 3 - Aleluya (Cosmic No. 3 - Hallelujah) (1977), a square canvas hung in the first room, where the eye is represented as a perfectly symmetrical aperture opening onto a solar eclipse, encircled by rings of cloud. The composition recalls René Magritte’s The False Mirror (1929), but it also resonates deeply with the symbolic geometry of mandalas. If the eye grants access to celestial realms, it is equally a gateway to the primordial. One of the largest works in the exhibition, Omega (ca. 1972), presents a giant, wide-open eye that, from afar, suggests the emotions of fear or frenzy. Yet as one fixes their gaze on the pupil, the eye morphs into a bodily orifice or volcanic crater, drawing the viewer in with an almost engulfing force.
Volcanoes dominate the landscape of southern and western Guatemala, and memories of volcanic activities are believed to inform the mythic episodes related in the Popol Vuh—its burning rains, exploding hearth-stones, and mountain-making giants. Inspired by the Popol Vuh and Dante’s Inferno, three works from the 1990s depict volcanic eruptions as oneiric scenes from the artist’s imagination. In the painting Noche (Night) (1992), fiery lava shoots upward, sending swirling, purple ash into the night sky. Upon close looking, the dynamic brushstrokes that make up the smoke seem to harbor spirits and forces of the underworld. In Erupción (Eruption) (1991), volcanic dust is evoked with remarkable economy through a few specks of ink.
Other works explore the eye’s relationship with the uncanny. In Ojo en la Ventana (Eye in the Window) (1973), a pink-lidded eye hovers near the upper center of the dusky canvas, peering out from the darkness as the viewer enters the gallery. A trompe-l’oeil frame and single-point perspective construction (whose vanishing point is the eye) suggest references to Christian religious paintings, while the composition also brings to mind Odilon Redon’s illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in which the eye stands for irrational obsessions and fantasies.
The cosmic unity of human and nature, palpable across Abularach’s oeuvre, receives a fantastical twist in Paisaje No.1 (Landscape No. 1) (1969–75), where half of an eyeball emerges from an empty field, like a lurking Cyclops. The composition is related to OjoMístico (Mystical Eye) (1970), hung above the mantelpiece in the same room, where the upturned eye again echoes a print by Odilon Redon, The Eye like a Strange Balloon Mounts toward Infinity (1882). Abularach associates the eye with the capacity to transcend human limitation, signaling foresight, numinous visions, and artistic imagination, as suggested by one of the ink drawings displayed in the aisle gallery, Casandra (Cassandra) (1983–86)—named after the Greek priestess and soothsayer who was fated to speak the truth but never be believed.
The show also features direct allusions to the female orifice and attributes to it the cosmic energy of creation (for example, Semilla - Seed [1967]). Such liminal points of our body and the Earth—the eye (and by extension, the genitals, the mouth, the ear) and volcanoes—form the throughline of this focused survey. One leaves with a renewed sense that these are magical portals between worlds: between external reality and the psyche, the heavens and the nether realms.
