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[[image - photograph]] Jesse Trevino’s painting at the Contemporary Arts Museum takes a super realistic look at a slice of life from the Chicano barrio. [[image - painting]] Bingo, a symbol of Chicano leisure life, is a theme for a new painting by Mel Casas, showing in the Texas Chicano show Dale Gas now at the CAM. BY CHARLOTTE MOSER Chronicle Staff THE STREET language of the Chicano barrio, unlike the lingo of the black ghetto, is unfamiliar to middle-class America. Phrases like “dale gas” or “con sago” are inside terms, the products of a bilingual people American by citizenship but Mexican by cultural ties. The visual language of Chicano artists is equally unfamiliar to American viewers whose awareness of Chicano activities are likely to stop at farm worker protests or the La Rama political party. With the current show at the Contemporary Arts Museum, the first large museum show of Chicano art in Texas, that unfamiliarity with a culture that comprises 25 per cent of the state’s population should be reduced. Organized by CAM curator Santos Martinez, the show contains some 80 works by 13 Chicano artists from throughout Texas. Only two of the artists - San Antonio’s Mel Casas and El Paso’s Luis Jimenez - have any artistic reputation outside Chicano culture itself. The others, ranging in age from 26-46, have shown among themselves in various Chicano art groups and some, like Frank Farjardo from Los Fresnos in the Rio Grande Valley, have never shown at all. The majority of artists in the show are from San Antonio. Most of them were associated with an art group called “Con Safo,” which coalesced in the early ‘70s. Names for Chicano slang meaning “King’s X,” the group nurtured the idea of being exempt from social pressures to conform to an Anglo culture, pressing for imagery from their own experiences. When the group disbanded in 1973, CAM curator Santo, himself the youngest member of “Con Safo,” decided what the Chican art movement needed was some gas to get going. He says he planned the Cam show for six years, naming it appropriately “Dale Gas,” Chican song for “Give It Gas!” In spite of unfamiliarity with life in the Chicano barrio, most viewers will likely be neither shocked or intrigued by the work in this show. Though Martinez says he wants to show that Chicano art is not all revolutionary, there are plenty of portraits of Zapata, Poncho Villa and La Rama eagles in these paintings. While some of the work is expertly conceived and executed, much is amateurish and naive philosophically. Even within one artist, the work is often uneven and directionless. This doubles reflects the age and exhibition history of these artists, yet some of the changes from earlier work of several years ago and recent work are striking. For example, five years ago, San Antonio’s Roberto Rios was painting somber, symbolic but compositionally sound pictures of sublet political content. He used symbols of Chicano culture - tamales, a preoccupation with death - in the two early works at the CAM. Then, in the last few years, he has switched to ethereal surrealistic imagery with cutaways of human bodies, references to Aztlan, and counter-culture mysticism in a style he has adapted to mural paintings. This new direction, so different from his earlier one, is also less accomplished and unique. Jesse Trevino, also from San Antonio, changed from a misinterpretation of the Pop Art Campbell Soup idea to a Chicano version of Richard Estes’ super realistic depiction of urban America. Though Trevino paints scenes photographed in the Chicano barrio, his ideas were not born there. The exceptions to this sort of development among the younger artists are the works by Caesar Martinez, Carmen Lomas Garzz and curator Martinez. Cesar Martinez from San Antonio seems to be taking the most sophisticated steps toward the realization of a demanding abstract Chicano imagery. His early woodcuts, some of the best works in the show, deal with Mexican religious symbols executed in a primitivistic style. His new work consists of transferring the abstract designs of Mexican serapes to color field abstractions. Although the addition of fringes along the canvas edges give it more a trompe l’oeil impressions, the idea could have interesting developments. Carmen Lomas Garza, a San Antonian who now lives in San Francisco and works with La Rama Gallery there, makes simple direct drawings of everyday life in a Chicano home. With their flat decorative designs, the works are reminiscent of Mexican bark paintings. Though most of the works don’t incorporate enough detail to hold interest too long, one etching called Loteria of a group playing bingo is an interesting slice of Chicano life. Both Garza and Martinez depict in their work a Chicano folk hero, Don Pedro Jaramillo, a turn of the century folk healer. Santo Martinez, the CAM curator formerly of San Antonio, is also attempting to adapt Mexican design motifs to an abstract painting style. So far, his work remains primarily decorative based on the stair-step motif of pyramids. Other work in the show varies in quality. Mel Casas is showing three new works continuing in his vein of bold cultural symbols juxtaposed with stenciled words. Jimenez is showing new sculptures and drawings. Jose Esquivel’s rattlesnake carved from mesquite tree is ominous, but the rest of his sculpture verges on tourist art. George Truan’s automobile environments are cliches by this time. Amado Pena’s revolutionary posters are bold commercial art. Joe Rodriguez, the only Houston artist in the show, is represented by the watercolor Tejano, the centerpiece for a Houston show two years ago featuring work by Texas Chicano artists. It’s a good work, but doesn’t indicate any artistic growth for Rodriguez. “Dale Gas” will show in the CAM’s upstairs gallery through Oct. 16. A free concert by Chicano musician Steve Jordan will take place today at 4 p.m. at the museum. Barrio to museum CAM show seeks to make a visual language for Chicano artists more familiar to middle-class America [[image - painting]] A subtle political statement by Roberto Rios is seen in this painting of a glad-handing politician serving up tamales to his Chicano constituents. Sunday, August 21, 1977 Houston Chronicle Page 15
