“My return to Cuba meant, above all, a great stimulation of my imagination, as well as the exteriorization of my world,” Lam acknowledged of his homecoming in August 1941. “I responded always to the presence of factors which emanated from our history and our geography, tropical flowers, and black culture” (quoted in L. S. Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982, Austin, 2002, p. 35). Since his departure for Madrid in 1923, Lam had remained in Europe, his painting lately cultivated by encounters with Surrealism—signally in Paris, under the aegis of André Breton and Pablo Picasso—and by the Afro-Antillean culture that he witnessed, from Martinique to Santo Domingo, along his journey to Havana. The extraordinary paintings that he made between 1942 and 1943, among them Omi Obini and the paradigmatic Jungle (see fig. 1), distill the creative syncretism of his practice, commingling modernism and magic in myriad recombinant forms. Among the most iconic works of global modernism, Lam’s compositions from these Cuban years subsume New World cosmologies within numinous, hybrid figures—plant, human, divine—that play out a vivid drama of transculturation.

Lam found an increasingly responsive audience in New York during the 1940s, cultivated through regular exhibitions at Pierre Matisse Gallery and enhanced by the rising prominence of Cuba’s modern vanguardia. “Lam started off with a great fund of the marvelous and the primitive within him, and sought to attain the highest point of consciousness by then assimilating the most skillful disciplines of European art,” Breton wrote in his introduction to Lam’s solo show in 1942 (A. Breton, “Wifredo Lam, The Long Nostalgia of Poets…” in Surrealism and Painting, Boston, 2002, pp. 169 & 171). By the t.mes of his next exhibition, two years later, critics celebrated the Afro-Cuban inflections of his recent work, an orientation implied by their titles: Omi Obini, Anamu, Ogue Orisa, Le sombre Malembo, dieu du carrefour. “A return to Cuba, and actual and renewed interest in that land, has produced a new kind of expression, one concerned with exotic plant growth, gods, and rites of African origin practiced today in Cuba,” affirmed Art Digest, which interpreted Lam’s “exoticisms” as “surrealisms (which no doubt they are), their color transcend[ing] their implications” (M. Riley, “The Lore of Cuba” in Art Digest, no. 18, June, 1944, p. 14). The Museum of Modern Art acquired The Jungle from this exhibition, partially redressing Lam’s absence from the museum’s landmark exhibition, Modern Cuban Painters, held that same spring. Inasmuch as the international orbit of Lam’s career ultimately transcended the Havana School, he shared with his compatriots a generational desire to articulate cubanidad, above all its Afro-Cuban elements, in his contemporary practice.

Among Lam’s closest friends and interlocutors upon his return to Cuba were Lydia Cabrera and Fernando Ortiz, whose pioneering ethnographic and anthropological studies of Afro-Cuban culture kindled new interest in Santería symbology and rituals. As a child, Lam had studied under his godmother, Mantonica Wilson, a Lucumí priestess, and with Cabrera he re-acquainted himself with Afro-Cuban lore; they attended ritual ceremonies (bembes) together and, for a period starting in 1943, Cabrera provided titles for many of his paintings. “The ancient, ancestral black deities who are withdrawn in the soft and engulfing light of Europe obsessed him there,” Cabrera wrote of Lam in 1944. “Here [in Cuba] they appeared tangible under the resplendent light of perennial summer. Here they are expressed with beauty and lucidity in each corner of the landscape, in each tree-divinity, in each fabulous leaf of his garden in Buen Retiro. With all the resources of a painter who thoroughly knows his craft, he paints the fantastic and prodigious qualities of Cuban nature in his canvases” (L. Cabrera, “Wifredo Lam” in Diario de la Marina, January 30, 1944, reproduced in L. S. Sims, op. cit., p. 67).

Omi Obini belongs to a series of anthropomorphic landscapes from this period, including The Murmur, The Green Morning, and Mofumbe ce qui importe, in which Afro-Cuban orishas percolate through hybrid, occult space. “As seen in Omi Obini and Ogue Orisa, occasionally the balance between the two elements tips in favor of the landscape and the fusion between plant and human is even more seamless than in The Jungle,” observes the noted Lam scholar, Lowery Stokes Sims. “Lam also used a ‘pointillist’ style to achieve a visual integration between figure and ground in the continuous repetition of separate daubs or strokes of varicolored paint,” Sims continues, “effectively visualiz[ing] the permeability between the physical and metaphysical worlds.” In some cases, “still-life elements are literally left white and surrounded by stippling as if they were stenciled onto the canvas,” a technique that “conveys the visual experience of the brilliant, reflective light of the Caribbean. In works such as Omi Obini and Ogue Orisa the forms as a result seem to flicker in and out of view, reinforcing the sense of a tenuous boundary between the physical and metaphysical” (ibid., pp. 47, 49 & 50.)

The pale central figure of Omi Obini rises elegantly, her body punctuated by a series of horned Elegua heads, amid a lush, foliate setting of cane stalks and palm fronds stippled with kaleidoscopic color. From her crescent head and falling tresses-tail to her cloven hooves, she appears an antecedent of Lam’s archetypal femme cheval, consolidated later in the decade. Yet she remains a more ethereal presence here, her figural liminality heightened by the fluidity of the thinned paint that Lam stained directly into the canvas, almost as if working with watercolor. The jewel-like pigments—green, blue, violet, ocher, red—bleed into each other; their saturated luminosity may have recalled to Cabrera the attributes of the orisha Ochún, associated within the Yoruba pantheon with water and sensuality.