Leaf 4
Green-Shine
[Maya Ruznik: New Mexico Museum of Art, St. Francis Auditorium; and Doodlet’s Storefront Window on Water Street]
Walt Whitman in his pulsing, sensous epic, Leaves of Grass--singing the body electric set within an impersonal, energetic Nature --comes closest to the entanglement of sacred and profane ruling Maya Ruznik’s powerful installation.
“Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not customs or lectures, not
Even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valv’d voice.”
The dimmed St. Francis Auditorium [1917]--now a regular venue for the Santa Fe Symphony and varied Chamber Music ensembles-- on off-nights, remains a capacious faux-plastered, vega-timbered, and wooden- pewed vacancy. Nostalgically designed in Pueblo Revival Style by architects Isaac Hamilton and William Morris Rapp, it was destined to be a community gathering place. Without an audience, however, it resembles a decommissioned Hispanic Mission Church, borne aloft by a herringboned spruce ceiling. Bereft of the chromatic choreography provided by storied retablo, hanging crosses, flaming hearts, gessoed wooden statues, and tin-framed icons of saints [think of the colorful riot of Doodlet’s Gift Shop: both the tumultuous interior and heaping storefront window], the space lacks moments of softness and brightness.
The large pale murals by Donald Beauregard [1884-1914] –completed after his untimely death—picture the canonical Life of St. Francis of Assisi, adding a stony coldness to the interior. Almost blanched, they share a striking affinity with the enormous Symbolist frescoes [also existing in a smaller triptych] by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. I am thinking particularly about his vast and wan Pastoral Life of Saint Genevieve [1879] in the Paris church of the same name.
Challenging this physical and painterly etiolation, Maya Ruznick’s three vibrant and visceral monumental canvases [all executed for this venue in 2025] question France’s disordering view of religion in the New World. Reflecting her past as a Bosnian refugee, it is not surprising to feel both an explosive savagery in her violent, green -flaring canvases as well as a luminous Edenic poignancy.
Kisa Pada, Trava Raste, Gora Zeleni , a phrase taken from a Slavic love song , whispering “rain is falling, grass is growing, everything is greening. ” Within this lush twilight, or dawn , landscape [lit both by sinking moon and rising sun] the young St. Francis cowers beneath the walls of Assisi listening to the commands of his unseen God as demons, monsters, and tumid serpent threaten. “Now go hence and build up my house for it is falling down.”
On the facing wall, and forgoing the vision of a simple return to earthly reality, hangs At Eternity’s Gate [For Van Gogh.] Under a perhaps afternoon sky mutable, filmy, and amorphous figures kneel or stand deep in spidery sunflowers. Neither the bursting nor the drooping types Van Gogh preferred, these belong to some hallucinatory grotesque jungle. Pink and blue phantoms with defleshed malevolent grimaces—distort the painting’s surface, roiling plants and flowers into a fragmented paradise lost
The Littlest God –-symbolically and ironically functioning as the huge, absent, arched High Altarpiece – is raised centrally on an otherwise empty platform at the preaching front of the room. In this futuristic phantasmagoria, night reigns. The dark viridian sky glows with the moon’s watery light. A gigantic green goddess has replaced the punitive God of St. Francis. She stands diaphanous in the midst of exuberant vegetation. Everything gapes and awaits in this new green fertile sacred order. Wide-mouthed polyps, tentacular jellyfish, fingering sea urchins rule this metamorphic universe. An aquatic suggestiveness flows through this pantheistic scene questioning the surrounding intractable walls and violent dogma.
1 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. The World’s Classics, Edited with an Introduction by Jerome Loving
[Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], p.32.