Flora y Fauna

By KEN JOHNSON

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Art in Review October 24 / 2003

Nora Aslan, who was born in 1937 in Buenos Aires, where she still lives, had a career in tapestry design before turning to collage. That background is evident in expansive fields of small, fragmentary photographic images of animals and plants that give the impression of a densely woven and luxuriantly patterned Fabric. But something more than just decoration is going on in these extraordinary lush works. Move in closer study and the opulent surface gives way to surrealistic nightmare.

An all-over field of pomegranates, many split open to reveal glistening ruby seeds, is randomly interrupted by deposits of human and animal teeth. A large, stunningly sumptuous grid, with bright green squares that give the impression of a backlighted stained glass window, turns out to be constructed entirely of intertwined snakes. A field of fleshy, erotically seductive tropical blossoms has been infiltrated by the gaping mouths of snakes.

The unnerving wedding of beauty and horror calls to mind Max Ernst and, among contemporary artists, Fred Tomaselli. It also evokes artists from the more distant past, like Hieronymus Bosch and Matthias Grunewald, for whom fantasies of heaven and hell were inextricably woven into the fabric of earthly experience.