Small miracles

In December I posted an enthusiastic blog about the Wellcome Collection’s Charmed Life show. I revisited last weekend and, finally, also saw it’s paired show Infinitas Gracias: Mexican Miracle Paintings, which friends had told me was the better of the two. Regulars of this blog will know that I am an admiring fan of the Wellcome’s exhibition team; so I found it a minor miracle to have elements that disappointed me in this second show.

The first two rooms, I should stress were fascinating, showing a wealth of these small paintings commissioned to commemorate the intercession of a saint in the drama of an ordinary life: saving a crop of a loved one, finding a lost animal, preventing an accident. Each had a simple label translating the text, and I found it impossible not to look at and read carefully every one. Yet, I felt that the third and fourth rooms which put these in the context of specific Mexican religious sites, lacked depth and felt rather like space fillers. The display narrative was too disjointed across the show as a whole.

Given the power of the paintings themselves, just as evocative as the Lovett amulet collection across the corridor, I would have liked to have seen a paired artistic response. The Wellcome blog is in fact hosting six modern illustrators’ responses to ‘miracles’ submitted by visitors to the show, but I would have enjoyed this much more in the gallery space. This is the kind of thoughtful, contemporary angle that I have come to expect from the Wellcome, and which I felt, for once, this exhibition itself sadly lacked.