A good example of realism is the powerful self-portrait "The Dreamer," by Ismael 'Izzy' Lozano, though the traditional gilt frame really has to go. Exemplifying figural abstraction is Tony Ortega's "Dos Beans," which depicts a Chicano couple promenading on the sidewalk. It's a signature Ortega in acrylic and collage. For cartoonish imagery, it's Stevon Lucero's oil-on-canvas "Xolotl," a depiction of an ancient Meso-American deity conjuring up a vision in the sky. Done in garish colors on a black ground, at first sight it looks like one of those tacky tourist paintings of a bullfighter on velvet.
There are a handful of things in this pastiche that more properly belong in the post-Chicano section, notably Ron Trujillo's pattern painting "Copper With White Flowers" and Daniel Salazar's two marvelous photographs of staged scenes populated by "Homies," small dolls that caricature barrio stereotypes.
"Carpa Stage," by Carlos Frésquez, Frank Zamora
and Los Supersónicos, multimedia installation.
"Mesmerizing Machine," by Quintín González, acrylic
on panel.
Details
Through May 21, Museo de las Americas, 861
Santa Fe Drive, 303-
571-4401
Related Content
More About
Immediately to the left of the Chicano-art salon is the showstopper of the post-Chicano section: "Carpa Stage," an installation that apes a stage from tent shows in Mexico. The enormous and ambitious piece was done by Carlos Frésquez, Frank Zamora and Los Supersónicos, a collective made up of artists from the U.S. and Mexico.
The floor of the stage was painted with stripes that resemble those in Mexican weavings. Along the front is a fence made from wooden uprights linked by ropes in red, white and blue. Off to one side is a wheel of chance with good and bad fortunes written on it. Across the back of the stage are three large cloth panels covered with evocative imagery referencing Mexico, corporate America and the mass media. Three more panels, also crowded with the same type of pictures, are hung above to form a partial canopy over the stage.
"Carpa Stage" is a perfect representation of the post-Chicano sensibility because it references the Mexican-American experience -- those colored ropes, the Mexican and Catholic imagery, the stage itself -- and at the same time is an example of mainstream contemporary art. Frésquez, who was also in the original Leaving Aztlan show at the CVA, is one of the region's most important artists, without any qualifications and outside the context of this Chicano/post-Chicano dialectic.
Another definitive post-Chicano offering is Ricky Armendariz's "I work in hell pero cielo is on my mind." For this piece, Armendariz painted a postcard picture of a western sunset, on top of which he made shallow carvings of a pair of Mexican eagles and wrote out the text of the title in longhand.
To be honest, most of the rest of the post-Chicano section really only qualifies because the artists have Spanish surnames; the work itself does not refer back to Chicano art at all. In this category is Lewis de Soto's "Traveller," a found-object installation of an old wooden crib with a radio-powered monster-truck toy inside that's activated when the piece is approached, causing it to zoom around noisily and crash into the sides of the crib. (The noise can be startling at times.)
Also hard to categorize as being uniquely Chicano/Latino are the two manipulated digital-photo diptychs by Jerry De La Cruz. "The Big Bang Revealed" has two images of a wrecked car -- one straightforward and in focus, the other an ambiguous computer-generated abstract. The same idea can be seen in "The First Noel," which has a beautiful little child with a halo on one side and a completely abstract composition on the other. Both are very good, and Ortiz sees them as being breakthrough pieces for De La Cruz.
Achieving a beautiful result was obviously all that was on the mind of Quintín Gonzalez when he created the four spin-art drip paintings hung together on the south wall. Each of these -- "Mesmerizing Machine," "The Restless Sky," "Empire of the Meek" and "Adversary to a World" -- sports a unique color scheme, every one of which hits the mark. Gonzaez applied the paint thickly, resulting in luxurious surfaces. The palettes are dominated by luminescent and iridescent shades normally associated with nail polish and eye makeup. I first saw Gonzalez's fabulous and exciting paintings of this type down the street at the Sandy Carson Gallery, which loaned the quartet that's on display here.
Museo director Ortiz succeeded in making Never Leaving Aztlan interesting, thought-provoking and filled with things worth seeing. But she failed in reconciling the old-timers with the upstarts, and there's an obvious reason why: The two points of view are irreconcilable. For the most part, the tradition-bound Chicano artists are never going to accept the cutting-edge post-Chicanos, and, needless to say, it won't happen the other way, either.
