Un Coq Pour Chango: The Oracle And The Green Bird

The art work by the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) titled Un coq pour Chango ( A Rooster for Shango) or The Oracle and the Green Bird was created in 1947. This piece represents freedom of art and human beings’ relation, connection to the nature, in particularly animals. I think the art work depicts 2 hybrid figures; audience can grasp from the title that one of them represents a human and another one represents a bird. Present location of the painting is The Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, and it’s original location is The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The painting is oil on burlap, it is presented hanging on the wall.

I believe that the purpose of this art piece is to portray Afro-Cuban imagery and show the kinship between humans and nature. The painting is medium size, it is 42 in. x 35 in. In spite of the fact that the painting is 68 years old, it is in a pretty good condition: it barely has any scratches or cracks, fissures. The colors look faded. However, it might have been the intentional part of the concept.

The focal point in Wifredo Lam’s A Rooster for Shango is Green Bird’s head; after moving around the painting my eye wants to come back to this point and rest there.

Large and medium sizes of the forms dominate over small in the painting. The arrangement of the objects in this art piece is mostly centric. However, even though it is central, it is not symmetrical. The painter also touched the left edge of the burlap and the right bottom corner of it; this helps viewer’s eye to enter the painting smoothly, move around and escape from it. The asymmetry of the arrangement creates the sense of imbalance. Lam uses basic lines and shapes in the composition. Nevertheless, the painter creates wonderful light movement inside the figure with wavy shapes, which directs viewer’s eye from the top to the

bottom.
Even though the medium is oil, the texture of the painting is surprisingly flat and watery. I think he used a small amount of paint in proportion to a bigger amount of solvent; because of this I thought when I first looked at it that the medium was pastel. Despite this, I think this pastel look makes the painting look more lightweight and adds some mysterious quality to the piece.
The art work also looks flat because it is two-dimensional, consists of simple shapes and does not have any value. The color scheme is quite simple and not variegated at all. Wifredo Lam uses black, white, green and yellow colors. Limited and dark/faded color scheme gives me sense of intension and depression.
Lam’s style of painting is cross-cultural, contains symbolism and is the mixture of two styles of painting: surrealism and cubism. The impact of Pablo Picasso’s style is clearly shown in A Rooster for Shango in the usage of geometric shapes and the way Lam painted the bird, turning it into an unknown mythological creature. Paining in his defined style, he is showing the freedom of art. Through his use of color, Lam emphasizes the strength and the seriousness of this piece.
Wifredo Lam’s style of painting reminded me of African totemism; I think this is the way how the painter represents African culture and this is also a trick to refer to the belief that human beings are connected to animals and spirit-beings. I think that Lam is trying to represent this in this painting. Moreover, the way he arranges the bird on the painting is almost like it is coming out from the Oracle’s body, it is part of his soul, his spiritual animal. Through his use of color, Lam emphasizes the strength and the seriousness of this piece.