Agustín Lazo

The evidence rests before us on a table, each object highlighted against an intense blue cloth, draped over or hanging from some unseen support. A spindly geranium with three reddish blossoms set in a strange planter in the form of an inverted head of a bearded man. A small pearl-handled pistol, perhaps a Derringer, a weapon easily concealed when necessary, the kind used by sly Western riverboat gamblers and carried by women for self-protection. A simple glass of water. Though the composition itself is hardly innovative, the objects are clues to a poetic "crime" that is difficult to solve, loaded with references to life and death, though surely there are deeper, more elusive meanings. The head-shaped planter is the strangest element. The thin walls and gray-white coloration seem to indicate it is made of hollow plaster, though it does not seem to be broken off from a larger sculpture. Is the bearded head with closed eyes a reference to the classical past or to Baroque art, or does it have a religious connotation? Is that a gunshot through the forehead, or just a hole for drainage? The Derringer here is discrete, even effeminate, unlike the heavy pistols waved about by Rivera and Siqueiros during their virulent debates of the 1930s or placed by Tamayo on a windowsill in his grim nocturnal painting of 1932, The Window [La ventana] (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). Perhaps it relates to the obsession with death that haunted much of the writing of Lazo's partner Xavier Villaurrutia, including the poems published in Nostalgia de la muerte (1938) and Décima muerte (1941), as well as his 1941 play Invitation to Death. And is it just a coincidence that the Guatemalan poet Otto-Raúl González dedicated a book of poetry to the geranium (Voz y voto del geranio) in the same year this picture was done? Perhaps, though one should not underestimate the rich intellectual context that shaped Lazo's work and dreams.