Art REview

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons:

Alchemy of the Soul

At Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, through

April 3. 866-745-1876, www.pem.org

SALEM — Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons mines a rich seam in her commanding show, “Alchemy of the Soul,’’ at the Peabody Essex Museum. The exhibit centers on an installation of bizarre and beautifully colored large glass sculptures — among them a mysterious mechanism for distilling rum — and haunting music by the artist’s husband and collaborator, composer and musician Neil Leonard.

The show is inspired both by Campos-Pons’s personal history in Cuba and by the history of the sugar and rum trade. It is deliberately theatrical. To get to it you walk under a wooden frame, intended to evoke the ruin or ghost of buildings on the sugar plantation where Campos-Pons grew up. In a hypnotic multiscreen video upstairs, we see Campos-Pons standing outside her former home on that very plantation, to which she recently returned after 30 years. That home was once a slave barracks.

But first, passing by stacked sacks of sugar and some fragments of corrugated iron, you enter a freight elevator, where a gallery guide puts some evocative Cuban music on an old-fashioned turntable.

Exiting the elevator, you can choose between the two galleries that make up the show proper: one to the left, the other to the right. On the guide’s advice, I took the left, which — setting the scene for the show’s main draw — contains a series of works created by the artist over the last decade.

Many of these are mediocre. Dye diffusion transfer (Polaroid) prints are not a happy medium for Campos-Pons (or perhaps for anyone). The prints here, arranged in grids of separately framed works, are explained by wall labels as Campos-Pons’s attempt to contemplate “the relationship between art, science, and the metaphysical.’’ They look blurry and amateurish. The large-scale watercolors are better, but not by much.

The most interesting part of this first gallery — and it’s crucial for what comes next — is in three parts. The first is a color reproduction of “Creation of the Birds,’’ a painting by the Spanish-Mexican surrealist Remedios Varo (1908-63). The second is Campos-Pons’s drawing based on the odd-looking contraption in Varo’s painting; it seems to be a device converting stardust into colored paint, which a seated human with owl eyes, covered in feathers, proceeds to transform into brightly colored birds.

The third related element is a large-scale sculpture, also based on Varo’s contraption, made from blue blown glass. Titled “Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits,’’ it stands in the center of the room, dominating it, triggering wonder and fascination.

What comes next, in the second gallery, is very impressive indeed. The large, darkened room is populated a series of similar glass sculptures. All tap into the surrealist poetry suggested by Varo’s painting — in particular her alchemical device, part science, part dream — but they are bigger, and less obviously indebted to Varo.

Since Campos-Pons’s work is an attempt to negotiate memory and loss specifically as it relates to Cuba, the sugar industry, and the slave trade that propped it up, the forms and colors these glass sculptures have special relevance. Their height — they reach 10 or 12 feet — evokes industrial buildings, rum distilleries, and smokestacks supported by scaffolding.

The segmented forms of the tall and narrow glass cylinders suggest chimneys and tubes but also the segmented stalks of sugar cane. The colors — dusty pink, a resinous yellow, deep green, dark gray — all feel apt, conjuring industry, night, flourishing vegetation, and the golden color of rum itself. (The mechanism for distilling rum — a sort of fountain that bubbles and gives off sweet-scented steam — wasn’t working the day I visited, but a fix was on the way, and it was easy enough to imagine its effect).

The short multiscreen video in a small adjacent room is well worth watching. It shows Campos-Pons back in Cuba, in the sugar plantation in La Vega where she grew up, surrounded by family and the descendents of old neighbors. It also shows the exposed frames of the old plantation buildings, the streets of the local town, rum being poured into glasses, and the stunning, brightly colored landscape.

It’s a poetic collage, modest but affecting, and somehow it tempers the aloof immensity of the neighboring glass installation, even as it deepens its associations.

Campos-Pons has featured in two Venice Biennales and enjoyed a glittering career. If her work has had a weakness, it is that it can feel incoherent. Taking too many forms, it is fired by too many eclectic associations, not all of which speak eloquently for themselves or in concert with the others.

In one sense, that eclecticism reflects the complexity of the artist’s history and subject matter; in another, it’s just how she likes to work. But the results do not always achieve the concentrated potency of great art.

This latest work is different. And it’s very exciting.

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons: Alchemy of the Soul

At Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, through April 3. 866-745-1876, www.pem.org

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.