Lewis Celebrates Fervor of Faith Art Review by Mary Webb The Memphis Commercial Appeal December 18, 1999

Family Site, Aquascalientes by Robert Lewis Divine Humility: Jesus Icons in Contemporary Mexico

In Mexico eight years ago, Robert Lewis, professor of photography at the University of Memphis, "dropped into a church to escape the enervating heat," as he said, "and witnessed the touching relationship between a believer and a statue of Jesus." This simple encounter marked a visual epiphany: Lewis has since returned to Mexico annually to traverse the country in pursuit of his subject, a quest that has led him into religious article stores, private homes, village churches and graveyards. The result is "Divine Humility: Jesus Icons in Contemporary Mexico," displayed at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis through Wednesday. Curated by Sam Yates, director of the C. Kermit Ewing Gallery at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the exhibition will tour nationally.

The 63 color photographs chronicle an impressive array of Mexican icons - elaborately carved, crudely fashioned and graphically depicted crucifixes, statues and mannequins dressed in robes and sporting wigs, armless vestiges and vividly painted cement and wood. Using a medium format camera and a hand-held flash, Lewis surmounted obstacles with formal rigor. In the uncontrolled but often confining spaces of churches, he fought and won the battle between his flash and the glass vitrines in which many icons were displayed. Using wide angle and macro lenses to magnify the insignificant and minimize the grand, he shaped and did not merely record images, transforming imagery into allegory. With consummate respect for the prayerful worshiper, he never captures their faces; rather, he focuses his lens on the icons, positioning the viewer at eye level in the worshiper's stance.

Lewis' photographic style and technique defy easy labels. His altar and crypt assemblages were shot head on and read like 17th Century still lifes, shining, raked in brilliant daylight and glistening with extraordinary detail. Floral arrangements and wreaths are classic compositions shot at gravesites from edgy angles and with light tracing across them to juxtapose deftly the vibrancy of the flowers against the texture of the granite. Lewis used gloaming electric poles as both totems of NAFTA modernity and visual grounding devices. Bathed in natural light, his shots of folk art icons constructed of found materials are transformed compositionally to elevate the mundane tributes to the plateau of contemporary installation art. Lewis manipulates saturated blue skies and aquamarine walls in efforts to isolate and reinforce the picturesque.

Lewis admits fascination with the Mexican use of fluorescent light and the unique greenish glow created by it. Instead of decrying it as kitsch, he sees the device as an indigenous element and embraces its ability to affect his work in remarkable ways; the tube of fluorescence becomes to Lewis what a candelabrum was to European tableau. Looking at every situation from a unique vantage, Lewis deploys the full arsenal of a photographer to accent the icons' textures, to soften in shadow, to isolate with color, to compose and to elevate in light. He leads viewers on a pilgrimage of the grotesque, the bizarre, and the baroque and the terrifying that is never less than reverent. Through his artful use of varying perspective, we walk with him into the religious article store; we stand directly in front of statues and pray; we gaze up at Christ with outstretched arms looking down at us from atop buildings, each image a stop on a unusually various and emotion-fraught Stations of the Cross.