Sonia Melara
Erotic Religious Art
By Marcia Newfield

Sonia Melara is a petite, intense 42-year old woman from El Savador who doesn't look like a traditional warrior. But warrior she is.

Her Pasiphae and the Bull, a prominent painting in Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation's show Feast of Desire held from Nov. 21 to Dec. 12, 2002, takes on the Catholic Church, Greek mythology and iconography usually associated with erotic art. The juxtapositions: a woman with her legs spread beneath the gushing erect penis of a male figure whose torso is chained and fixed at a considerable distance from the woman's flesh, an insert of a head that looks like a penis, a framed crowned and haloed head of Christ resting atop a bull's head, a suspended chair dripping with red is mid-air while on the chair seat is a direct view of a woman's genitalia surrounded by strips of gold silver and copper leaf in the shape of a crown. The painting, completed in 2002, is composed of four 40" x 36" panels in shades of gray (a monochromatic technique known as grisaille), using oil, silicon, and black pencil. One panel seam occurs just above the head of the chained man's penis.

What does it all mean? My visceral reaction was that I was in the presence of an art work from inside the frame of Latin and Central American traditions where the boundaries between magic/realism, asleep/awake, logical/dream are fluid, thus leaving a viewer at the mercy of their own perceptions and projections.

The story of Pasiphae and the Bull is a story of violence: Poseidon sent a white bull that he expected to be sacrificed. Minos didn't want to part with that particular bull, so beautiful was he, so he substituted another bull on the pyre; Poseidon in revenge inflicted lust for the beautiful white bull on Minos's wife. Pasiphae convinced the architect Dedalaus to build her a disguise to help her seduce the bull. He carved a structure in the shape of a cow into which the queen crawled in order to get the bull's attention. The Minotaur, half man, half bull, was the progeny. Queen Pasiphae, a sister of Circe, took the rap for a fight between the guys and went to great lengths to express her unusual desire (predating Edward Albee's The Goat by many centuries).

Other Melara paintings also blend Christian imagery with explicit sexual renderings usually associated with erotic art. Color is used very sparingly. She has a particular affinity for sanguine, a red iron-oxide crayon and the blood red color. She uses a fiery red oil to render blood dripping from the soles of anatomically detailed human feet in The Blood of the Lamb, Resurrection and Eros Bleeding.

Although Melara has so far focused more on the eroticized male nude body, her images of women -a nude bent backwards, are similarly sexualized. Heart of the Virgin Mary presents a hairy, textured vagina. Most often, the aura surrounding her gorgeous, grounded classical lines is one of pain. One of her paintings of the crucifixion features a slim male whose fragility, despite his active organ and articulated muscles, brings to my mind all the young men who are currently martyred by a Catholicism that rejects and condemns them.
Making art since she was twelve, Melara grew up in Catholic Schools and experienced the permeation of religious life in El Salvador. She says that for a while she tried to paint figures without religious imagery but it kept coming back.

Although her bold sexualizing of Christian images may seem to imply a critique of traditional Christian art that desexualizes the body, she says her quest is not to express anger toward the Catholic Church but to explore the nature of human beings. She poses her friends as models, makes many drawings, and then sends the models away and lets the muse have her way. The result is paintings of subtle control and mastery of classical techniques, boldness and imagination.

After training as an architect at the Albert Einstein University in San Salvador in the 80s, Melara went on to post-graduate work and practice in urban administration and planning in Central America, Israel, and Arizona. Although her first affinity to visual forms came through film, as she traveled through Europe she absorbed the perspective of Renaissance painting. After practicing architecture for five years, since l991, she has devoted herself exclusively to painting and hopes to obtain an artist's visa to live in the United States.
From the first time the prestigious art center in El Salvador, Patronato Pro Patrimoaio Cultural, voted in 1999 to show twenty of Melara's paintings in a show entitled Anno Domini [The Year of the Lord], 1999, her work has created controversy. She's been censored in Guatemala, El Salvador, and in the 2002 Erotic Daily Life show at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, her work in a public space is covered on weekdays. "People either hate it or love it," she says. In 1991, she had her first solo exhibition in El Salvador. In 2002 she was part of the Arte Latino Contemporaneo show at the Nassau County Museum of Arts. Her work has been accepted in group exhibits in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Ecuador, Japan, Taiwan, Israel, the Artlink Sotheby's International Young Art 2001, and the Leslie-Lohman 5th Lesbian Biennial.

I include Melara in a pantheon of women artists who bring an unexpected sensuality, physicality and sexuality to their paintings, photographs and installations: Artemsia Gentileschi, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keefe, Louise Bourgeois, Nicole Eisenman, Nan Goldin, Judy Chicago, Alice Neel, Nancy Spero, Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke, Sylvia Sleigh, Yayoi Kusama, Mella Jaarsma, Helen Chadwick, Monica Sjoo, and Karen Finley, to name a few.

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Marcia Newfield has written reviews and poetry about art ever since she attended the Cummington Community of the Arts in the 80's and broke bread with visual artists 24/7. Her work has been published in Helicon Nine, Calyx, Downtown Brooklyn, NY Arts Magazine and the 1975 NOW Journal of the Convocation of Women in Writing.

Sonia Melara
Pasiphae and the Bull, 2002
Pencil, oil, gold/silver/copper leaf on board, 6'8" x 5'4"