ART / Cathy Curtis : A Rather Grim Picture of Latino Art From S.F.

The obvious reason for an exhibit like “Mano a Mano,” at the Modern Museum of Art in Santa Ana through Jan. 1, is to pay tribute to a minority group--in this case, Latinos--whose members tend to be excluded from serious discussions of contemporary art.

But the more striking aspect of this show of work by 16 painters from the San Francisco Bay Area, organized by the Art Museum of Santa Cruz County, is that it inadvertently points out how a small, inbred art community can stifle artistic growth. I’m not referring to Galeria de la Raza, the San Francisco storefront gallery with which many of the artists in the show are connected, but to the curiously stagnant condition of visual art in the Bay Area during the past couple of decades--a situation I observed as a resident during the ‘70s and early ‘80s.

The Bay Area had a Golden Age during the 1950s (heyday of lyrical brands of abstraction and figurative painting) and early ‘60s (the era of the ratty, nose-thumbing sculpture and assemblage called Funk). Ever since those expansive days, the region has been limping along in a drearily self-congratulatory mode while many artists have left for other, more vigorous, less parochial environments.

Curator Rolando Castellon writes in the catalogue that the title--a Spanish expression describing the confrontation of two bullfighters--is meant to suggest the artistic divide between abstraction and figuration, in which Latino art has its folkloric roots. But the notion of confrontation seems absurd in a show so devoid of energy.

Although Castellon makes a special point of including abstract work (rare in most Latino painting exhibits), the sampling on view has a discouragingly enervating effect. Although the best of the late ‘40s and ‘50s paintings of such Bay Area artists as Hassel Smith, Richard Diebenkorn and Frank Lobdell were tight, inventive pieces on a small scale, the flaccid paintings by the artists in this show tend to meander vaguely over vast swaths of canvas--the extra square footage seemingly a pointless carry-over from Color Field painting of the ‘60s.

Ethnic heritage seems to be irrelevant in this connection. Oh, sure, Manuel Villamor (whose paintings, it must be said, are on the small side) incorporates Mayan symbols into his jewel-toned work, and Jerry Concha plays with references to cross forms, a glancing reference to the dominance of religious imagery in Latino art.

But the blandness of virtually every one of the non-figurative paintings seems to point to a larger climate of intellectual fuzziness, painterly exhaustion and lack of drive to pursue fresh, new directions. After all, the artists in the show are not self-taught naifs dwelling in foreign villages ; they live in urban America and (with a couple of exceptions) have the same university and art school educations as their non-Latino peers.

The figurative painters work in a variety of styles, including ersatz primitivism (Carmen Lomas Garza); poster-influenced figuration (Rupert Garcia); straight-up realism (Daniel Galvez); personal twists on Neo-Expressionism (Eduardo Carrillo, Carlos Loarca), and a sculptural treatment of layered paper, burlap and paint (Beatrice Hablig).

Some of these approaches are lost in a lyrical haze (for example, Carlos Loarca’s big-’n’-murky animal silhouettes are too wishy-washy to convey the folkloric resonance he seems to be after) and many suffer from the overly literal simplifications of poster art. Yolanda M. Lopez’s painting of a massive Aztec goddess--possibly a feminist reinterpretation of a male god--has the ponderous look of heavy-duty propaganda.

Happily, a few pieces in the show do work in precisely the way Castellon intends--not as rallying points for some undefinable Latino quality in art, but as human, personal, stylistically well-finessed contemporary art.

Hablig’s three “Graces” are fragmentary female figures who also suggest outdoor terrain. Their pastel pink-and-yellow “desert” bodies are smartly arrayed against the wall, connected by the hems of their black-crosshatched, ruggedly “mountainous” dresses. Hablig’s deftness in matters of scale, outline and coloration keeps the woman/landscape conceit fresh.

Carrillo employs a style with antecedents in the work of the great Mexican muralists in “Los Bucaneros,” a vivid work from 1974. In a more recent painting by Carrillo, “Two Brothers Fighting,” this vivid, busy style becomes a lot more mannered, the stylized figures tinged by a sharp yellow light, suggesting that the artist was influenced by contemporary Italian art.

Garcia is known primarily for his mastery of the poster idiom. His paintings have the same urgency and starkness, but unlike some of his peers, he has learned how to infuse a certain subtlety into his work. In “Reds Against the Nazis” he throws the silhouettes of trench-coated men aiming bayonets against a streaked yellow background. The angle of vision is cinematic (Are we looking at them from a trench below?) and the sunset sky suggests an ironic romanticism.

In “Scenes from Father’s Bone Scan,” Ann Garcia Urriolagoitia incorporates tiny photocopied X-rays of her dead father’s torso into a series of small, gold-tinged painterly hangings suggestive of both vertebrae and religious paintings. There is a tentativeness about the work that keeps it from being as strong as it might be, however, and the two other paintings on the same theme are also overly diffuse.

The only artists conspicuously missing from this show are curator Castellon himself (for obvious reasons) and Carlos Villa, the Wild Man of Bay Area Latino artists, whose paintings used to bristle with feathers and glass before he went in for a ritualistic approach in which he imprinted parts of his body on the canvas.

So the picture of Latino painters of the Bay Area begins to look rather grim. But a similar slice of artistic activity by other Bay Area painters is likely to turn up as many clinkers. The moral seems to be to stay alert, seek out challenges, welcome conflict and avoid complacency. It’s a moral that applies to Orange County too.

“Mano a Mano: Abstraction/Figuration” continues through Jan. 1 at the Modern Museum of Art, Griffin Towers, 5 Hutton Centre Drive, Santa Ana. Hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Admission is free. Information: (714) 754-4111.