The fanciful creatures that inhabit Bridget Tichenor’s paintings include strange figures with human faces and long insect legs who live inside shells, carapaces, or armour. Their hybrid bodies are gigantic, and they tower over natural landscapes that seem suspended in twilight, with a mood clearly influenced by Surrealism or Magical Realism. Like almost all of Tichenor’s oeuvre, these paintings were made after she moved to Mexico in the 1950s, where she joined other European friends like Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Alice Rahon. Tichenor studied in Italy with Giorgio de Chirico and then in the United States with Paul Cadmus. From the former she drew a highly metaphysical approach, while from the latter she learned the ancient techniques of egg tempera, putting them at the service of her fascination with pre-Columbian mythology, mysticism, and symbolic, cryptic narratives. Her work Dueto solitario (1964) shows a barren volcanic landscape containing two large, speckled shells, painted with scientific precision. While one is tightly shut and explicitly suggests female genitals, the other is wide open, its spacious cavity housing an anthropomorphic moon with a hypnotic gaze. Drawing on the firmament of myths that link the moon to magic and the sacred, Tichenor represents the shell as a woman capable of holding and nurturing life, but also of becoming a magnetic, mesmerising, divine being.
Stefano Mudu
