Lateral Altars

Elena Climent

In my recent paintings of lateral altars in the churches of Oaxaca, I have tried to express how much they move and touch me.

Almost as soon as I began visiting churches during the year I spent in Oaxaca, I perceived a tension between the front and the lateral altar, the first representing the Church’s authority with its established way of doing things, and the second where people express themselves in a far more personal way. In these side shelves, niches and tables I saw the most amazing displays, beautiful but also charged with a feeling of drama and rebelliousness. There seemed to be this complicated relation between the ideal way of arranging an altar, symmetric and organized, and the fact that the people who are trying to express themselves through these arrangements have lives that are not so perfect and orderly.

I think we all tend to symbolize our life issues through the arrangements of objects. I always find it most interesting and inspiring as an artist to see how different people create their home environments, and how much you can assume about someone by the way in which he or she organizes their space.
In the case of lateral altars something similar happens. Somebody will have a relationship with a particular niche in a church and will care for it and provide it with fresh flowers, candles, Christmas lights, image reproductions, toys, candies, cards and photos and they will sit next to it and spend some time praying or just thinking.

I honor these altars and the faith people deposit in them, through painting. The fact that painting takes so much labor and time is important because it allows you to truly identify with your subject and at the same time to create something new from it with a life of its own; this is the magic of painting. I am not a religious person in any formal way. I was raised in a secular environment distant from institutional beliefs and rituals and I have always been extremely rebellious against letting anybody tell me how to think. But painting lateral altars helped me truly appreciate and admire the faith and power of the people who created them and it made me aware of my own spiritual feelings. I believe that in essence we are all much more similar than different; this is why art has been able to defy time and space so well, allowing us to connect with each other even through enormous distances, even through the centuries.