The Body Beautiful

They weave around a wrist like iron lace, along the edge of a foot like an embroidered hemline, spiral the palm like a branch shadow projected by the sun.

Written on the body, these imprints--deep red strokes that fade into an echo of an image--are the markings of a North African and Indian tradition called Mehndi, an ancient art of henna painting.

Henna is known as much for its apothecary powers as its magical properties. And depending on the culture, these henna-based talismans conjure spirits, celebrate prosperity, ritualize nuptials, offer protection or serve as intimate, erotic love charms.

What had been for centuries a household tradition, handed down by women like oral history, last summer slipped into gritty city vernacular as heat-seeking New Yorkers got their introduction to Mehndi. On an opening night at Bridges + Bodell, more than 300 people wound through the East Village gallery. “The Mehndi Project,” which combines on-site application with fine art photography, was the toast of New York’s cocktail-dress-and-work-boot set, its tail wind so strong that the owner of L.A.’s Galerie Lakaye got a gust of it.

“I was blown away particularly because it was a feminine art form,” says Carine Fabius, “practiced by women for women.”

The L.A. version of “The Mehndi Project” will christen Galerie Lakaye’s second location on West 3rd Street on Friday night. Mehndi artists Loretta Roome, Rani Patel, Judith Hooper and Denise Kerr will work surrounded by an exhibit of Mehndi photographs by Robert Tardio, Tracey Eller, Audrey Davenport, Jill Waterman, Karl Steinbrenner and Gordon Lange-Kelley. Pascal Giacomini’s Mehndi-themed sculptures round out the show, which will include on-site applications, walk-in or by appointment.

Project founder Roome’s first glimpse of Mehndi is an indelible memory: a scene late in Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of Paul Bowles’ “The Sheltering Sky.” An emotionally shattered, but now rising Kit (Debra Winger) perched on a bed, her hands, fingers and feet wrapped in a web of hennaed lace.

“I thought what is that? A tattoo?” recalls Roome, an artist-musician who, after a friend had Mehndi done on her feet, began digging for its history. Her search led her to a New York bookstore and Nishit Patel.

“She told me she was looking for books on Mehndi and I told her she could go out to Jackson Heights [a heavily Indian community in Queens] and get her hands painted,” Patel recalls. “But she didn’t want that. She wanted to learn something about henna. ‘It feels good looking at it. It is something that I would like to learn to do,’ she told me.

“So I looked her in the eyes for a few seconds and then said: ‘My wife, Rani, will teach you.’ I could get a sense of her. I knew it for sure. This kid would do something amazing.”

Roome, with nine months of training to her credit, shrugs off the praise a bit shyly: “I was the fool who stumbled on a pot of gold,” she says with a chuckle.

Because of the cult surrounding body art--from tattoos to piercing--she expected interest to be high. But more important, Roome says, “I just thought we really have to put some of these images out in the world.”

The henna, taken from family recipes, takes hours of preparation before being applied via

bottles with tips in various sizes, similar to cake-decorating nibs.

“People love it,” Fabius says, “because, first, it doesn’t hurt. It’s beautiful, and it’s not permanent.” It lasts from two to six weeks, depending on skin type, the area ofbody used, sun exposure and other factors.

What has impressed Roome thus far is that, with a few outrageous exceptions, people want traditional images, true to the art form but sometimes with personal touches, like text that wraps around the entire body or images that link two people like panels of a screen painting.

Roome expects the response in L.A. to be even more intense. The equation: More skin shows here because there’s more opportunity to expose it. And with Naomi Campbell posed in a recent Harper’s Bazaar with her shoulders and clavicle etched with a vine-like Mehndi pattern, the show’s already begun.

But amid all the trend-conscious clamor, Roome wants to stress the importance of recognizing the art form’s significance--its origins, purpose and ancient message.

“It’s not just what is happening--the tube against the palm of the hand,” Patel explains. “It is a kind of merging of one soul to another.”

“So much is private to each culture,” Roome says. “And I’m really in a privileged position to learn. I don’t think we have many opportunities to imbue something with such feeling. To understand animism.

“In Morocco, they talk about different objects having a lot of baraka--power. The actual henna plant has a lot of that. And the design has a lot of baraka as well. And the art of Mehndi, an extremely private blessing, is a dialogue between the person and the invisible.”