Tribal Story Telling
By now, if you have visited Galería Namu’s website or our gallery in San Jose, Costa Rica you cannot fail to notice the preponderance of the mask form. We have several kinds of masks from a couple of different tribes, but overwhelmingly the Brunka tribe has allowed us to bear witness to that ethos which traces their spiritual journey over the last 500 hundred years. The mask is the distinctive spirit of their culture; it is the distillation of the core values and beliefs that make up their cultural heritage: all their trials, tribulations, cosmology and spirituality are carved into their incomparable masks.
As surely as art is a way of representing something else: a thought; a concept; an intangible; a cultural construct etc., so too is the mask an intense pictograph of the personality of a person or of a people. This visual creation, therefore, serves as a window into the soul of a person or a culture. Today, and for millennium in the story of mankind, the mask mediates as the means to express the inexpressible as it manifests the complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society. On the one hand, it makes a definite impression on others, while at the same time conceals the true nature of the individual.
Native Mask Expression
Sometimes a conversation about masks can be a little unsettling as shades of Jungian revelation flicker in our unconsciousness! However, let’s look closely at a wondrous mask (image at top) that was brought into the gallery by a mature and very accomplished artist, Edixon Mora Lázaro. This over-sized mask is large, standing 3 feet tall and resembles a cultural totem as it goes beyond the traditional ‘mask-made-to-fit-on-the-face’ format. This truly is contemporary Native expression of something so well known to the Brunka people – and all who admire their masks.
It is an exploration of the vernacular art form of the mask which discards the norm thus shaking those who view it out of their complacent expectation of what a ‘mask’ is! Edixon, like so many other native artists before him, has intensified the mask experience making it an icon which purifies and concentrates the known standard.
As a picture tells a thousand words, so you must see for yourself the image of this totemic power piece. Feel the sea of diablo faces pulling you into the tight clan, the family of masks that fit seamlessly together. These images that link together give a feeling of strength and power. The chosen persona for the classic Brunka mask, that of the diablito (‘little devil’ an allusion to the non-Christian and surely misunderstood ancestors of the Brunka when met by the newly arrived and intolerant Occidental – the Spanish), inscrutably looks inwards through hooded lids. You will notice too many profiled diablitos guarding the edge of the totem while the ultimate guardian reigns above all: the sacred, all-powerful kurá (jaguar in the Boruca language).
It is a privilege for us to behold amazing art which seems to be daily evolving before our eyes, and it is a joy to share this wonder with you. This mask is on our web site and available for acquisition: click here for details.
