Angry Young Latino Changes Locale, Thrust

Willie Herron, one of the bad boys of East Los Angeles’ Latino art scene, has moved to Laguna Hills. If his work at the Acevedo Gallery (4010 Goldfinch St., through Nov. 5) is any indication, the shift was one of temperament as much as locale. Few traces remain of the passionate, provocative Herron, who gained prominence in the early ‘70s as a muralist and founding member of the collaborative Asco (Spanish for nausea or disgust).

Though Herron still deals with issues of racial tension and oppression, he dilutes these potent themes now with an overriding concern for form and technique.

“Interference,” for instance, the title work of the show, portrays a man’s upper body, his arms raised overhead and fists clenched. Herron makes the defiant posture all but invisible, however, by fracturing the image into quarters and arranging them, self-consciously askew, upon a richly colored ground.

His method of splattering paint across the canvas, here and in the other painted works, seems intended to evoke a sense of raw energy, but instead, its uniform waves of color recall the airbrushed anonymity of slick graphic design. Ultimately, the works read more as attractive, decorative pattern than as fiery statements of protest, even when protest is their avowed subject matter.

In “Echoes of the Fallen” and “The Americas,” the dramatic potential of an image of hands groping behind a chainlink fence and barbed wire is buried beneath this decorative veneer. Only a few images here convey the tension and struggle implied in such subjects.

“Tears in Hands” is the most successful in matching a tough subject with gritty, dynamic imagery. A young man’s face peers out from the center of the image, intense and imploring. His gaze is repeated with a pounding, persistent rhythm in the space below. Above, two hands with spread palms reach into the upper corners, suggesting the posture of a man being searched. Unlike the other images, which impose a safe distance between subject and viewer, “Tears in Hands” puts the viewer in the position of aggressor, searching the young man, catching his eye and having to answer that haunting gaze.

Local painter John Rice Churchill averts his eyes from the strife rampant in the material world to focus inward, on private harmonies and meditations. In his first one-man show in San Diego, at Oneiros Gallery (711 Eighth Ave., through Oct. 22), Churchill presents a series of mindscapes that embody a quiet, introspective probing. Churchill’s images rely primarily on a personal symbolism of abstract shapes and patterns, but they also touch on the universal in their repeated use of organic and animal forms.

Forms float freely in his compositions; they meander across the surface in serene equilibrium. With titles such as “Offerings of Gratitude” and “Sacrament,” the works take on the quality of prayers, celebrations of the inner magic of the universe. The painting “Peaceful Creation” (also the title of the show) depicts a euphoric vision of white birds beneath a radiant gold sky and a host of other indeterminate shapes. Churchill uses gold often to define the sky, a practice common in religious paintings until the Renaissance, when the symbolic gold of heaven gave way to the misty blue of earth’s real atmosphere.

The tranquil optimism of Churchill’s painting is seductive, but the evenness of mood throughout his work can also be numbing. The forms in many of the images dance a spirited dance, but others stumble clumsily in an amorphous haze. With a bit more resolution, Churchill’s works might all come alive.

William Tucker’s massive, cast-bronze sculpture, “Okeanos,” was installed this week in the main courtyard of Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, 10666 N. Torrey Pines Road, to commemorate 25 years of scientific investigation there. Against the stark geometry and static symmetry of the white clinic, “Okeanos” stands as an emblem of pure organic energy. It emerges from the ground obliquely, in rough, columnar form, bending before reaching its 13-foot height.

From a distance, the work appears to be huddling, almost pitiably, shrinking inward, but from a closer vantage point, “Okeanos” takes on a greater air of authority.

Its encrusted, deeply gouged surface suggests the natural erosion of the earth as much as it hints at eyes and other features of a hulking figure. Tucker, a British sculptor living in New York, affirms sculpture’s essential three-dimensionality through the range of interpretations suggested by the work when seen from multiple viewpoints, beyond that implied by its title, the name of the ancient Greek god of the sea.

Monumental sculpture continues to be redefined during these years of turmoil for public and large-scale works of art. Tucker makes a rich contribution to this dialogue with “Okeanos.”

The sculpture is monumental, and its basic form harks back to the columns and stele of the ancient world, but at the same time, it shies away from its monumentality, folding in on itself in a more modest show of strength.