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ANCIENT ROOTS, NEW VISIONS
Los Angeles  Jim Moisan
The first national touring show of work by Latin- and Hispanic-American artists is at the Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery. Ancient Roots, New Visions, organized by Fondo del Sol, an artists' collaborative of photographers, filmmakers, and visual artists, based in Washington, D.C., is a large and diverse exhibit - over eighty artists are represented, some with several pieces. To focus attention on themes common in the works, the exhibit is divided into four parts: Santo, Retablo, and Folk Art Traditions, Pre-Columbian Roots and Rituals, Art of the Barrio and Political Art, and Inner Vision, Avante Garde and International Currents. Apart from these thematic tributaries, the main current of the show is drawn from highly personal, figurative and romantic traditions in visual art. A striking contrast is offered to mainstream concerns with process, texture, and formal properties of media.
The largest pieces in the show, by California artist Larry Fuente and New Mexico artist Luis Jimenez, are eye-catchers. Fuente's Oasis, also called Throne, is an eight-foot-high altarpiece in mosaic, the centerpiece of which is a toilet - completely covered in buttons, coins, shells, costume jewelry and other objects. The work has a large back that is inlaid with broken shards of glass, somehow giving the effect of church stained glass. The center of the piece is dominated by two white swan statuettes flanking the Virgin Mary. Pictures of swans are also inlaid at other pieces in the work. (Swans and toilets seem a perfect combination, though it might be difficult to say why.) The "pretty" aspects of the mosaic are stood off or balanced with tougher images, such as rows of 22-caliber bullets and shaped metal tubing. In sum, the work has an appeal that is impossible to resist.
Jimenez's two large epoxy-coated fiberglass sculptures are slick, flamboyant and vaguely satirical. Grandmother with cat is an elderly woman in a black dress sitting in a black easy chair; in her lap is a cat who nearly matches the gray or nearly white hair of her head. Like those who spend a lot of time in a chair, she looks as if she were poured in. The simplicity, sadness and the dignity of the woman are evident, doing silent battle with the lurid slickness of the materials. Jimenez's life-size motorcycle racer, Silo, bends down to cut down wind resistance. In spite of its size, the sculpture looks light and inflatable, like a balloon that might go floating off at any moment.
Southern California artists are well-represented in the show. In the Art of the Barrio and Political Art category there is a fine abstract painting by Frank Romero, titled Los Four, also the name of the artists' group with which he is associated. The work is an effective and memorable takeoff on
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[[caption]]RICARDO DIAZ: TONANTZIN, lithograph, at the Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, Los Angeles. Photo: Tom Ives.
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[[caption]] RAY BRAVO: MORDIDITAS, 1975, watercolor, thread Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park.[[/caption]]
spray-can graffiti. Harry Gamboa has constructed a two-dimensional altarpiece that contains three compelling images of his face which may be partially handcolored, but which are apparently obtained from a color Xerox. Because his face was placed on the machine, it has been partially flattened, giving the look of a corpse and overall producing a haunting picture that brings to mind the dead Che. The Truth About Terror in Chile, by Gronk, is a painting of the torso and limbs of a man who has been starved and/or tortured. Rudy Martinez's ceramic piece shows a man with stereotypical symbols of Mexican culture on a print shirt, and roses either covering his eyes or filling up his eye sockets.
In the Santo, Retablo, and Folk Art Traditions section is Benjamin Serrano's Judge's Feast, a wood sculpture and construction, with a Christ figure in a death cart, flanked by two smaller figures wearing boxing gloves and whose intent does not appear to be friendly. In this category also is Ricardo Diaz's painting on paper, Tonantzin, which alludes to the Aztec goddess of motherhood, who was culturally transformed by Christianity into the Lady of Guadeloupe. In the Inner Vision category, Patssi Valdez's self-portrait looks like a Pachuca with a red rose and dark red lips.
Excellent works abound in every category. Mel Casas' superlative painting, Humanscape #68, or Kitchen Spanish, depicts a Mexican or Chicana maid with an underdeveloped cartoonlike face. The family for which she works is depicted realistically, however. Especially notable is the face of the disturbed young boy, on his way to becoming a pathetically neurotic young man. 
The carvings and constructions in the Santo, Retablo and Folk Art section are uniformly delightful. Luis Leroy's My Grandmother's Dresser Top is an altarpiece, with Christ flanked by a friar on one side and a woman in a chair on the other. The cross in the background uses a pair of bird's wings for its cross-members. Cart With Many Problems is a humorous work, and a very effective and elegant one, by Pedro Lujan. A rudimentary cart with four square wheels is holding, or rather held down with, a large stone.
Maria Lino's series of masks inside wire mesh boxes (Inner Vision) is a successfully spooky, and in the same vein is Adal Maldonado'a metaphysical photograph, A Problem with the Conversation, of a man who appears to be contemplating the lengths of string that are stretched from his mouth to his hand.
In the North Gallery at Barnsdall, a smaller show, New Visions - L.A., contains work by local young and emerging Latino artists, curated by Josine Ianco-Starrels. These offer a contrast with the local artists in the national show, in that a much greater interest is shown in process and abstraction - though the show is balanced with many figural and representational works. Robert Delgado's mixed media drawing, Dancing Figure #7, is a highly abstracted figure. Ray Bravo's Mordiditas is a whimsical piece in which teeth drawn on paper that has been cut and pushed out to hold a three-dimensional rose. Joe Moran's collage, titled What A Shame You Can't Read This, attempts to outwit the viewer. Rosalyn Mesquita's mixed media work gives the appearance of rusty or stained sheets of metal. Patricia Murillo's Construction Print #5 is an interesting paper-and-wire assemblage set in a glass case. 
Other artists represented in this show, which is up for the duration of the national exhibit, are Luis Serran-Cordero, Linda Vallejo-Dillaway, Eloy Torrez, Arturo de la Fuente, Dennis Garcia, Martin Garcia and William Ortiz.
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ART Week - Los Angeles - 28 July 78