Charming Noveltees

Miracles and Charms, Wellcome Collection

) Mugging and more. Life is bleak and dangerous, yet these tiny iterations of faith remain serenely, sublimely confident that there is meaning after all.

Many of the works are charming. Others are powerful. More than a few have clearly powerfully influenced artists from Frida Kahlo to Francis Alÿs. One, with its inscription missing, shows a yellow floor, two giant wooden chairs and a bed on which stands a tiny peasant woman. What is the miracle that has been performed? One has no more sense than in a Max Ernst vision, and yet the picture continues to resonate.

In the second room the curators have recreated an ex-voto wall from the church of Cristo de Villaseca, where the Cristo Negro hangs above the altar, performing miracles in the old silver-mining town of Guanajuato. Here are letters, cards, photographs, crocheted baby clothes, a wedding dress, even a drawing on a Styrofoam fast-food tray, all left by petitioners who ask the Señor de Villaseca to help them. Here are also three short films, one showing a retablo being commissioned, as the supplicant tells the artist his story, which is then fleshed out in front of him, his communication with the saints made visible; another is an interview with a man caught in an earthquake, who helped rescue others trapped in the rubble: he commissions a retablo which is erected in a small niche in the rebuilt street: for those who are here, he says, for those who should be here, and for those who are here no longer.

Source: The Arts Desk