Yasmin Almonte-Lantz speaks for and to generations of women who have passed through life's phases of growth, merging, pain, inner incarceration, abuse, withdrawal, individuation, quiet gestation, quickening, and finally freedom - scarred, albeit wiser.

Back from a three-year battle as a Filipina graduate student in Iowa, Lantz wields her brush like Joan of Arc's polished sword. Her paintings show a merging of dichotomies--figurative versus abstractionism, open versus closed forms, statically versus dynamism--using the visual eloquence found in a dance between human figures, fruits and vegetables. Aptly titled Metaphor, this figure-fruit-vegetable visual conundrum collection speaks in layers.

The darkly triumphant Free is Lantz' self-portrait greeting Hiraya's gallery with bloodstreaks on her wrist. Below that is an entombed Lantz in Me, but is she really entombed or just in gestation?

What strikes piercingly is that most are done in furious blood red. One shows a figure merging with a red pear, while Kiss of Narcissus reveals an approach-avoidant figure. The paradoxically bloody yet peaceful Birth shows a woman half-submerged in a pool of blood in the core of an acorn squash - one of themost hauntingly confrontative works. Still another is the violently chauvinistic Reaper, showing a man about to shred the vulva-looking core of a peach. Quietly ominous is Priestess, which enigmatically stands out as one of the few works without a fruit.

Lantz' three-year gestation has finally led to Persephone's return from the underworld.

Except for one, all are done on masonite. Most are within a cramped square format- a pictorial space that is inherently static (read: boring), yet in this case, Lantz demonstrates the dynamic potential of the brushstrokes, textures, and color.

The last piece, Without Fault, is done on canvas, with hints of a new emerging brushstroke, one that begins to be streaky, connoting a new phase, a new cycle, or a new spring heralding Persephone's return.

The works are diaristic, as described by Lantz in her own words. I cannot help but put her visual power in the same league, as Frida Kahlo's, one of Mexico's greatest painters. Kahlo painted self-portraits chronicling her inner turmoils, her battles with her husband, and the tragic events of her life as an insurgent artist (she was a member of Mexico's Communist Party).

Kahlo's and Lantz' paintings disturb and haunt. You would not want them confronting you with your shadows when you wake up in the morning or when you sit down to dinner. Nope, they are not for the ordinary art investor-living room decorator.

Lantz belongs to a museum for all Persephones bound by their own private underworlds to see.

Also read:

"Woman and Red" by Karen Kunawicz

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