ART REVIEW : Visible Roots in ‘Expresiones Hispanas’

Ethnicity is written all over some of the works in “Expresiones Hispanas 88/89.” In others, references to Latino culture are tucked into crevices. But except for a half-dozen abstractions and a couple of free-floating figurative pieces, the exhibition at the Southwest Museum (to Sept. 4) emphasizes that roots are the source and sustenance of minority artistic expression.

Plain as that may be to the viewing public, the definition of Latino contemporary art seems to have been a sticky issue for the organizers and jurors of this Coors-sponsored national competition. “In an effort to avoid any predetermination of what constitutes ‘Hispanic Art,’ ” the only criterion for inclusion in the show was “artistic excellence,” exhibition director Maureen Leon Acosta writes in the catalogue.

Juror Giulio V. Blanc declares that the show “contributes to the elimination of the old myths of Hispanic art” and avoids being trapped “by the ethnocentric view that certain elements must be present if an artist is truly ‘Hispanic’: strong colors, folkloric or ethnographic description, religious and political statements.”

Paul Sierra’s large oil, called “Chronicle,” seems to bear this out. His claustrophobic interior would look powerful in any context. Two different generations trapped in the same room are separated by a psychological distance reminiscent of Max Beckmann’s “Family.”

But there’s no denying the prevalence of ethnocentric subject matter. Everywhere we look we find examples: intricate patterns reminiscent of Mexican textiles; symbolic hearts, skulls and skeletons; primitivistic retablos ; playful folk art; fantastic views of death; passionate scenes of street life and dens of iniquity; dignified images of brown-skinned, monumentally scaled people, reminiscent of Zuniga and the Mexican muralists.

Apparently it’s easier to make statements about freeing artists from the bonds of their native history and culture than to exorcise these elements from their art. If jurors actually wanted to present current Latino art as part of an ever more homogenized international mainstream, they were either undone by the persistence of nationalism or won over by the strength of art that comes from the heart of a culture.

That bond doesn’t preclude diversity, however. The show is restricted to two-dimensional works that seems totally irrelevant to avant-garde issues, but “Expresiones Hispanas” offers a wide variety of style and content.

There’s a compelling intensity about the best of it, manifested in Bibliana M. Suarez’s strip of masked faces, Gilberto Ruiz’s ecstatic, levitating woman; the massive back of a warrior painted by Jose Luis Rodriguez. Sometimes this passion descends to the pits of lust, as in Gloria Claudia Ortiz’s painting of a man with two chicken-headed prostitutes and Jorge Posada’s “Pieces of Flesh,” framing a shadowy pair of men in the provocative pose of a stripper.

Fidencio Duran, on the other hand, comes off as a regional surrealist whose strange home-on-the-farm scene, called “Cactus for Supper,” depicts a misshapen woman in surroundings that are simultaneously weird and familiar. She’s too big for her landscape, but she doesn’t seem to know it as she concentrates on clipping needles from a cactus.

“Amor Eterno,” by Alfredo Ceibal, reverses this contrast of scale but also plays with conflicts between confinement and freedom. A miniature couple are perched on high chairs at a big table in an oversize room, while a younger, freer version of them dances in a painting that also offers escape through a window.

Once encountered, the issue of freedom--psychological, physical and political--becomes a leitmotif. We see subtly it in the cropped, running legs pictured in Ani Gonzales Rivera’s photograph and much more obviously in Santiago Mauricio Vaca’s painting of a blindfolded prisoner and Stephen Sarinan-Lampson’s Polaroid montage of a man under suspicion. Even a fun-and-games approach such as Sal Guastella’s cartoon-like painting, “If You Can’t Bear to Lose, Don’t Play the Game,” depicts a bound fellow being burned at the stake while dogs greedily snap at him.

There’s no escape in the eyes of these artists, but there is the release of artistic expression. Even an exhibition tailored by a committee and sponsored by a company seeking to improve its image with the Latino community can’t stifle that conviction.

The Southwest Museum, 234 Museum Drive, Highland Park, is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Information: (213) 221-2163.