ART REVIEW : <i> ‘Mira!’ </i> Unites 29 Latinos With Taste for the Fantastic

Whether for political or other less obvious reasons, Latin American writers and artists tend to be fabulists, spinning elaborate metaphors out of the dross of ordinary life. Despite their differences, Borges, Marquez, Llosa, Fuentes, Puig, Matta, Kahlo and Cuevas are united by a certain taste for the fantastic.

That common strain emerges again in 29 artists of Latin American heritage living in the United States, whose otherwise diverse work is assembled in “ Mira! (Look!) The Canadian Club Hispanic Art Tour,” at the Municipal Arts Gallery to May 15.

In a catalogue essay, co-curator Ricardo Pau-Llosa notes that the show is not about the “immigrant experience.” Rather--whether the artists are based in Miami, New York, Texas or California--the paintings, assemblages, installations, drawings and other media continue a 20th-Century Latin American aesthetic that derives from European modernism, particularly surrealism.

Some of the work on display is flavored with specifically Latin cultural elements (the carnival, a macho outlook, an intense and colorful Catholicism). Other pieces are the product of a bumpy ride on the bandwagon of contemporary international art trends.

How all of this strikes its audience will depend partly on its tolerance of shrine imagery, rehashed Neo-Expressionism and Surrealist tricks like Rodolfo Abulararch’s eyeball triptych or Enrique Castro-Cid’s simultaneously expanding and vanishing female torso standing on a checkerboard floor.

As is usually the case, the best work seems not to be in need of special pleading.

Two of these pieces create a dream state of altered perception.

In a large, delicate charcoal drawing, “Ghosts at Dawn,” Paloma Cernuda vibrates horizontal stacks of striped tubing and vertical disc forms at white-hot speeds in shadowy space.

Mario Bencomo’s “Paradiso Lontano,” a painting of small, blurry, black-bordered blue vegetative forms curving through a soft yellow and red field, suggests a myopic vision of something--a detail from a painting? a piece of fabric?--that resists being named and known.

Of the pieces with religious associations, Carlos Alfonzo’s painting, “Veneziana,” is the most compelling. A noisy, blue-white vortex of shooting rays and spirals, it is peppered with the outlines of boxes, daggers, huge nails and sexual organs--references, the catalogue mentions tantalizingly, to the Yoruba religion of East Africa as practiced in Cuba.

Personal narratives and histories figure into the work of numerous artists, most tellingly in Tony Mendoza’s photographs-with-texts. The commentaries give the person in the picture a specific history and context that tend to supersede whatever information may be readable from the image alone.

Although the catalogue notes that Mendoza’s work may be related to Latin fotonovelas --novels with panels of photographs, like adult comic books--he works in a format that owes more to developments in contemporary American photography than to any specifically Latin American influence.

A deliberate primitivizing streak runs through another group of works, most successfully in Alfredo Ceibal’s painting, “Don Cirulo’s Wake,” with its little pockets of activity--sex, worship, dancing, sleeping, voodoo rites--scattered within a huge interior.

Ceibal includes a tiny still life of a candle, table and suitcase that somehow sums up his image of life in the midst of death as something you move through like a tourist, grabbing whatever satisfactions you need along the way.

Surprisingly, only two Los Angeles-based artists are included in the exhibit. Roberto Gil de Montes contributes a painting of a cartoonlike “Moth Man” and a tiny landscape painting with a memento mori wooden frame carved with snakes, skulls and nudes.

Patssi Valdez’s shrine installation, “The Dream,” alludes to aspects of female devotion, pain and celebration within Catholicism via photographs of women with head coverings and closed eyes surrounded by crinkled metallic paper, long nails partially driven into the wall and a black ruffled heart.

Too bad the show didn’t snag a couple of Carlos Almaraz’s paintings. His images of ordinary life injected with the color and throb of visionary experiences pursue the Latin American fascination with fantastic imagery at a strong, high pitch too rarely seen in the works on view.