Pioneering Mexican Artist Benjamin Serrano Dies at 49

Benjamin Serrano Banuet, a Mexican artist who caught the vitality and clash of cultures of border life in his sculptures and paintings, died last week at age 49 at his mother’s home in Tijuana.

Serrano had been suffering from complications of injuries received when he was hit by a car in Tijuana two years ago.

Felipe Almada, a fellow Tijuana artist, Monday described Serrano as one of Tijuana’s “first great artists . . . one of the persons who opened the arts of Tijuana to the world.”

Serrano’s art reached far beyond the limits of his hometown.

“He was enormously gifted,” said Ronald Kuchta, director of the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y. “He had an extraordinary imagination and derived an awful lot of his inspiration from the juices of life in Tijuana, from the people and from their folk heritage.”

Serrano combined surrealism and pop art to create an outlandish style, which he used to reflect the extremes and teeming diversity in his hometown.

A garrulous raconteur, Serrano loved regaling his many friends with wild tales. He was given the nickname Pinnochio because of his penchant for blending reality with fantasy in his storytelling.

Serrano was born in Tijuana in 1939. His father was a musician who had worked at the casino at the Agua Caliente Race Track. As a child, Serrano worked at the family music store, where he gained a broad knowledge of Mexican music and its folk origins. He studied art at Escuela de Artes y Letras in Guadalajara, Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas in Mexico City and the School of Art in Coronado.

Serrano traveled and studied in Europe in 1964 and 1965 and returned to Tijuana with his future wife Danielle Gallois, an artist he had met in Paris. They were divorced last year.

Recognition came to Serrano in the early 1970s. “Tijuana Mania” showcased him and two other Tijuana artists in 1972 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The title was Serrano’s choice, said Kuchta, who curated the show.

The San Francisco Chronicle described Serrano’s 1973 exhibition at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum as putting “Mexican sculpture on the map for the first time since Cortez knocked Montezuma off his throne.”

However, Serrano’s wildly expressive work with its clearly recognizable figures went against the trend of minimalism, then in vogue.

“In an era when society and much of its art had become narrow and technical to the point of dehumanization, Serrano soared (and) celebrated humanity,” wrote David Smith in an introduction to a 1973 exhibit of Serrano’s work at the Baxter Gallery at Caltech in Pasadena.

“My art has three essential things,” he told a writer prior to a 1974 exhibit in Aspen, Colo. “It has religion, sexuality and authority.”

The religion tied a family and a community together, he said, while the sexuality offered freedom. The authority, or machismo , he said, came from the combination of the first two elements.

He might have also added a fourth element, humor.

“He was a precursor of humor in art for this generation,” said Mary Moore Little, a La Jolla art dealer and personal friend. “Benjamin’s work overflowed with the comic, spirited and deeper (concerns).”

Following the television series of Jacob Bronowski’s “Ascent of Man,” Serrano made a painting that he titled “The Descent of Dr. Bronowski’s Socks.” Serrano’s “Jesus Christ and the Butts of Love,” shown in a 1987 exhibit at the Mary Moore Gallery, “mixes religious and sexual imagery with delicious irreverence,” wrote Times’ San Diego County art critic Leah Ollman.

“Serrano’s work sparkles with humor and poignancy,” Ollman wrote, “and provides the inspirational focus of the show.”

Because of his love of people, Serrano tried to combine painting and socializing, often with disastrous results. Prior to the de Young exhibit, he was running behind schedule. A handsome man, he was also regarded as something of a Chaplinesque figure--riotously funny but also at the mercy of fate.

“He had a tremendous recognition (as an artist), but he had very little product because he was deflected by his own enjoyment of life,” Little said. “He was so generous. He shared himself so flagrantly that he didn’t focus on his own well-being, or his own future or his own anything.”

Little said it was tough to be a dealer for Serrano because he was always giving his paintings away.

Serrano’s sister, Migdalia Escobedo Serrano, agreed.

“I just wanted him to survive by painting normal things that people would buy,” she said. But not everybody took such works as “Lady Godiva Rides the Pony Express to Deliver an X-Ray of a Broken Heart of a Man She Thinks She Loves” with the humor and spirit her brother had intended.

Alcohol eventually became the tragedy of both Serrano’s professional and personal life.

“He would have achieved a lot more fame if he sustained his work over the last 10 to 15 years,” said the Everson Museum’s Kuchta. “Because of his drinking problem, I think he was debilitated in terms of producing work and getting his work seen.”

Serrano is survived by his mother, Beatriz Serrano Banuet, his father, Benjamin Serrano Gonzalez, and sisters Migdalia and Olivia Serrano Banuet.