What a wealth of Latin talent currently on display at the
Bergamot Station galleries! There were Carlos & Elsa & Gilbert & Dora
and Javier & Gustavo and Jaime. I might have missed others—my time in the
galleries there was regrettably limited.
Carlos & Elsa & Gilbert & Dora are at
CraigKrull Gallery. Carlos is the late
Carlos Almaraz, whose work is also
prominently exhibited in
Playing with Fire, a current retrospective at the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art. He was married, during his all-too-brief life span, to
Elsa Flores. Gilbert
is (the also, sadly late)
Gilbert “Magu” Lujan, who was working with and
alongside Carlos and Elsa back in the 1970s and 80s and who, with them, was a
prime mover in the “
Chicanismo” movement—which they all managed to transcend
with the strength of their individual vision as artists. Magu also has an
important current retrospective,
Atzlan to Magulandia, at the UC Irvine gallery, which I have not yet seen. Dora is the ceramic
artist
Dora De Larios, whose longevity happily persists until this day. The
gallery’s exhibition is a powerful and moving tribute to these artists, whose
work was essential to the long-delayed elevation of Latin art and culture to a rightful
place in their California home.
Carlos and Elsa—may I presume to call them by the names with
which I am so familiar?—are shown side by side in a gallery dedicated to their
work. Of the two, to judge by what is on display, Carlos was the more profoundly
engaged in the history of Latin culture, beginning in ancient Mesoamerica and
continuing to thrive in the contemporary world...
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Carlos Almaraz, Baby Face, 1986, pastel on paper, 24 x 30”
|
His paintings are frequently
playful, fantastic, always infectiously energetic and vivid, working with
iconography that ranges from the landscape of dream to fiery freeway crashes. They
explore and expose both the artist’s inner consciousness and the social
realities of the outside world.
Elsa’s paintings are more purely lyrical, in my view. She
works mostly with landscape and figure in thickly, seductively applied layers of
paint...
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| Elsa Almaraz, Maya’s Chair, 1985, oil and encaustic on linen, 12 x 9” |
... as much an exploration of her medium as her subjects. Echoes of van Gogh in the above! A pink chair, rather than a yellow one. Am I fantasizing to see a hint of feminist protest here?
Magu has two rooms at the gallery. One is almost entirely
devoted to his iconic and often hilariously exaggerated images of lowrider cars...
 |
Gilbert “Magu” Luján, 52 Custom Chevy Fleetline, 1992, acrylic and ink on paper, 18.375 x 23.125”
|
... some seemingly
throwaway items on scraps of paper, but always drawn with masterful ease and
fluency. He is well known for the letters he would send to friends (I am
fortunate to have a couple myself!), their envelopes wildly decorated with
these fantasy cars. But Magu was also obsessively concerned with other icons of
Latin culture, and for a long while a leading activist in the promotion of
Mexican American ideas and values. The available selection of his work in this
show represents much of what he was about in mostly small scale, but leaves a
great deal untold about his more expansive work as an artist.
I was delighted to be introduced to Dora De Larios’s work,
which I have seen in parks and other public spaces without even knowing they
were hers (there is, in particular, one striking, massive wall-sized
installation at the Montage hotel in Laguna Beach). Her smaller works include
both beautiful ceramic vases and bowls with intricate incised or raised
decoration...
 |
Dora De Larios, Untitled, 2017, stoneware, 5.5 x 12 x 12”
|
... and ritualistic, animalistic objects...
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| Dora De Larios, Amazon Goddess, 2017, slab built unglazed stoneware with iron oxide, 27 x 11 x 9” |
... that hark back to the centuries
old traditions of pre-Columbian art—but with an indisputably contemporary
flair. All are delightful to the eye. And, whether utilitarian or sculptural in
reference, these are the kind of objects that seem to demand the touch of your
hands, to get the full “feel” for their magical presence.
There’s a similar quality to the work of
Jaime Guerrero at
Skidmore Contemporary Art. Guerrero is also inspired by Mesoamerican culture
and ritual, and creates figures that are, in some cases, copies of actual
relics and, in others, creatures of his own imagination...
The kicker is that he makes
them not in clay, but in glass. Having learned the basic craft of glass blowing
at the feet of a Murano master, he has adapted it to his own vision and
purpose, teaching himself the means to almost perfectly simulate in his glass
sculptures the appearance of clay and other stone surfaces. The exhibition,
appropriately titled “Contemporary Relics: A Tribute to the Makers,” is
stunningly installed (the design work of the artist’s wife), with a variety of
figures and masks, ranging from the quite tiny to the quite large. They are a
tribute to an aesthetic value that has become rare in the contemporary world:
hand-craftsmanship.
William Turner Gallery hosts exhibitions by two painters,
Gustavo Ramos Rivera and
Javier Pelaez. Ramos Rivera’s large-scale, largely abstract
paintings play with expansive fields of brilliant color interspersed with bold
line drawings and floating abstract forms that have the feel of a personal,
esoteric iconography.
 |
| Ramos Rivera, Al Mal Tiempo Buena Cara (A Good Face for Bad Times), 2015, oil on canvas, 84 x 84 inches |
They inherit from the tradition of painters like Joan
Miro, and at times share something of the ferocious,
impulsive spontaneity of a Jean-Michel Basquiat. We sense in
his paintings a sturdy commitment to an individual vision, along with a passion
for medium and process.
A newcomer to the Los Angeles art scene, Pelaez comes to the
William Turner Gallery from Mexico City, where the artist has an established
reputation. Coming from an initially realistic tradition, he experimented at
length with images in which natural objects (such as flowers) were distorted
into glittering, fluid abstractions of pure color, in which the process of
their making became the focus of attention. In this first Los Angeles
exhibition, Pelaez shows a remarkable series of paintings in which evocatively
painted floating rocks...
 |
| Javier Peláez, PRGB4, 2017, oil on canvas, 35 x 42 inches |
... reminiscent of those irregular moons of satellites we
see in images from outer space, hover in spaces ambiguously defined by severely
divided monochrome backgrounds. The Baconesque effect of figure and ground is
accentuated in a recent small diptych (the snapshot image below was kindly provided by the gallery, awaiting a more precise one) where the image we see in one panel
shatters in its neighbor into smears and fragments of exploding paint...
 |
| Javier Peláez, MATERIA I, 2017, oil on mdf board, 15.7 x 11.8 inches |
... as the
illusion of the rock’s physical presence dissipates (as the flowers, above)
into a display of pure color and paint.
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