Seas of change.

• Author: Turner, Elisa
• Position: Cuban artist Lydia Rubio

For much of her career, Lydia Rubio has painted magical, luminous interiors. They often include tables draped with silken folds or lace-edged cloths, which her artistic sleights of hand transform into the shimmering beaches of Caribbean islands. With unexpected flourishes that not only fool but also thrill the eye, domestic trappings become sandy setting featuring feathery royal palm and verdant hillsides. Such Caribbean scenes harken back to her native Cuba, but Rubio's art reaches far beyond nostalgia. She Painted Landscapes, for example, is a beautiful work that employs dramatic shifts in scale, taking viewers from tabletop to mountaintop, dazzling the eye with illusionistic detail. Its visual gamesmanship toys with our perceptions of what is real and what is painted -- speaking also to the vagaries of memory, and to how memories take on a life of their own, distinct from the past.

Gently balanced on the mahogany tabletop in She Painted Landscapes is a worn, creased book open to several pages of landscapes. Battered but still haunting, it is a homage to the more conventional paintings that her grandmother made in the Havana home where Rubio grew up in the 1950s. The book seems to be propped against craggy mountains emerging from the table, enticing the viewer with a surprising, surrealist juxtaposition. And Rubio has concocted still another surprise: The azure sky of one page in the book, filled with cottony clouds, seems almost to blend in with the expanses of gorgeous Caribbean sky that stretch beyond the simple mahogany table. Here the viewer is presented with the intriguing spectacle of paintings of paintings, and paintings of landscapes, washing into one another. The combinations are improbable but stunning, luring the observer into the dreamscapes of Rubio's artistic imagination.

In this work as in many others, the artist creates a poetic interplay between the sea, sky, and land. Interiors often float in a space that somehow embraces all three elements. As me looks at her work, magical realism a term used to describe much contemporary Latin American fiction, inevitably comes to mind And, indeed, the fabulous worlds of writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Alejo Carpentier, where marvelous coincidences gleam throughout narratives suffusing present and past, do invite comparisons with the fantastic scenes and shifting proportions in Rubio's paintings.

"There is a definite connection in some of my works to contemporary works of...