ART REVIEW : ‘MIRA!’ MIXES BARRIO LIFE, POP CULTURE

Jaded art buffs are apt to find the work in “Mira!” a trifle naive, but some intriguing issues surface in this conservative, cozy show at Plaza de le Raza. Second in a series of traveling surveys sponsored by Canadian Club, the exhibition of paintings by 33 Latino artists essentially grows from a venerated pictorial tradition that invites individuals to fashion images reflecting the way the world looks to them. Meanings and intentions are made as clear as possible by these artists, most of whom presume little and favor riotously colorful palettes.

“Mira!” (through June 19) suggests that these artists have a frame of reference having little to do with Post-Modern dialogue. Like the revamped mariachi music of the Los Angeles group Los Lobos, this art has one foot in the barrio and the other firmly planted in the realm of popular culture, and it frequently affects the graphic breeziness of slick album cover art. However, even as Latino art makes its bid to move uptown, it continues to be staunchly traditional and rather sentimental; these artists are big on neighborhood scenes, portraiture and still-life studies.

Jesse Trevino paints the cantinas in the barrio of San Antonio, where he lives; Federico Vigil depicts the interiors of colonial churches in New Mexico, and Carmen Lomas Garza records typical Latino housekeeping rituals in an intentionally primitive style. While Cesar Martinez pays homage to the Chicana women of the pachuco era that he remembers seeing as a young boy in Laredo, Martha Chavez commemorates household pets and Jorge Drosten paints full-figure portraits in a flat, frontal style reminiscent of Henri Rousseau (like Rousseau, Drosten surrounds his subjects with a suffocating abundance of lush foliage). Surprisingly, there is virtually no mural art in the show, nor is there much propaganda or political art. Acknowledgments of avant-garde styles come in the form of severe geometric abstractions by Fanny Sanin and the Neo-Expressionist canvases of Arnaldo Roche Rabell, who paints with a frenzy worthy of Anselm Kiefer. These artists are, however, exceptions to the rule. Ultimately, “Mira” isn’t particularly interested in perfecting the grammar of the avant-garde, preferring instead to introduce that world to the visual dialect the Latino culture has been speaking for decades.