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8
The Houston Post
SUNDAY, Sept. 11, 1977
Art

Chicanismo
From a barrio-oriented culture come the visual metaphors of a new age

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Luis Jimenz's 'Progress II' - a bold statement in a conservative show - Post photo by Jerry Click

By MIMI CROSSLEY
Post Art Writer

Chicano art is a gas, proclaims the first large-scale exhibition of the movement's painting, sculpture and printmaking just opened at the Contemporary Art Museum.
And it is: icons of plastic and neon, Mexican metaphors and Aztec allegories all mixed in with images from the barrio and La Raza as shaped by the hands of 13 Texas artists.
It is vital, colorful art that comes on strong, with the impatience of a held-up parade - an idea and exhibition long overdue. Gathered together by CAM curator Santos Martinez (the sole Chicano museum curator in the country and one of the artists represented in the show), the 85 works share a concern with forceful imagery or color first, innovations in media and technique second. And they are held together not so much by a political ideology but by a common culture: Chicanismo.
Chicanismo is the state of being a chicano, an American of Mexican descent who is bilingual, bicultural yet unassimilated and holds to a barrio-oriented culture. Chicanos in the 1960s and early '70s were mainly political organizers espousing "brown power" on the picket lines, at the polls and school board meetings.
Today, the language of that dissent has become a street culture, and chicanos still fight a subliminal battle against assimilated Mexican-Americans, a term chicanos say they despise.
Yet the polemic force of the '60s has now become more an artistic metaphor. San Antonio artist Amado Pena's posters of Che, Zapata and Juarez in brown berets made in 1974 have given way to sophisticated silkscreens of the patterned faces of revolutionary heroes a la Andy Warhol.
Even Mel Casas, the leader of the Con Safo group in San Antonio which preaches the purest chicano line, is painting at one more removed from yesterday. The furling black eagles of the farmworkers pictured in his ironic Pop Art "Humanscapes" structured like TV or movie screens have given way to thoughtful, conceptual images: "Got to Draw the Line Somewhere" is a bright cerise abstract line in a high-key "Mexican" green field.
Similar metaphorical works abound in the show. Cesar Augusto Martinez appears to have left his folk-art-inspired colored woodcuts of skeletons and plants to make Op Art color-stripe paintings that are also Mexican serapes. Francisco Fajardo of Houston creates severe, elegant conceptual pieces of brightly colored cord; these fashionable-looking "space lines" tacked from wall to floor at angles are actually variations of Mayan pyramids.
It is the profusion of faces, scenes and vibrant objects in the works that set the pace, however. George Truan, an art professor at Southmost College in Brownsville, has taken his elegant, parabola-shaped icons of photographs, drawings and paper under plexiglass and mounted them in deliberately trashy backdrops of souvenirs and tacky newspaper collages.
CAM curator Martinez presents Super Realist drawings of barrio street scenes in the obsessive, detail-haunted style favored by many of the artists; Jose Esquivel's delicate drawings are a variation of that obsession. With echoes of Mexican master Jose Luis Cuevas and American Lucas Johnson, Esquivel's art is one of the exhibition's fine discoveries.
The heart of the show, however, is the work of San Antonio painter Jesse Trevino who presents five of his huge, Super Real canvases. Trevino does not go for photographic reality; he flattens and softens his compositions from "La Raspa," a man with a juice stand (1977) to the commonplace but enigmatic old car in front of a barrio house, "El Carro En La Calle Zarzamora."
Trevino trained at the Art Student's League in New York and became a portraitist. A painstaking brush is his trademark, and fashion has come his way rather than altering his style to meet it; his purist method is so perfected it comes as an ironic footnote to know the righthanded artist lost his painting hand in the Vietnam War and now paints equally well with his left.
Roberto Rios explores a garishly colored comic book cartoon style, packed with science-fiction superheroes with Aztec heads and loincloths made of the Aztec eagle. Joe B. Rodriguez of Houston, director of the Chicano Art Gallery at the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans, works a finer line on a Surrealist strain. One of his newer works is in homage to the late Mexican artist, Frieda Kahlo, called "Kahlo Fantasy," a water-colored ribcage topped by an all-seeing eye.
The folk strain is strong, too, whether in the highly refined prints of Carmen Lomas Garza - the single woman in the exhibition - picturing the myths of barrio life in woodcuts and etchings, or the cruder but powerful wood carvings from mesquite by Jose Rivera. In his hand, tree trunks become crucifixes, branches are snakes.
In the middle of the CAM floor is Luis Jimenez's monumental-sized image that caps the show. Some 22 feet long and 10 feet high, the cast fiberglass and steel work called "Progress II" is a rip-snorting cowboy roping a bull, with all weight and mass flung out at extreme angles. It takes Jimenez's deliberate contradictions as far as they go: exciting sculptural style done in slick, trashy fiberglass like a shooting-gallery prize.

Though "Dale Gas: An Exhibition of Contemporary Chicano Art" seemed a long time in arriving, it comes out of a tradition fostered for years by Prof. Jacinto Quirarte, dean of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Texas in San Antonio. Quirarte's book, "Mexican American Artists" (University of Texas, 1973), is the source book and bible of this artistic force, though chicanos today say he cast too wide a net around the Mexican heritage.

But pulling that net back in too close can sometimes run the chicanos into curious problems: We are not supposed to compare Mel Casas to Pop artists of the early '60s like Robert Indiana and Tom Wesselman - though he follows their tracks some 15 years later. Instead, we are supposed to regard Casas' works as chicano cultural images: chicanismo first, technique second.

Because of this emphasis on message, there is an oddly conservative feeling to the show. Only Jimenez seems interested in stretching and altering his medium for art's sake, not just for the greater glory of the chicano culture.

And the net can get too tight to work for individuals. The hard line is to reject a "watered down" Hispanic tag, but many of the artists in this exhibition also showed in the Tejano Exhibition curated by Rodriguez which traveled the state last winter. And several have works in the huge "Roots and Visions" show of the National Collection of Fine Arts (and coming to Texas sometime this year) which includes artists of Cuban, Puerto Rican and Latin American heritage.

The Chicano Art show will be up through Oct. 16.