THE BIG MIX : Art : An Art That Cuts Close to the Bone : Works of 30 artists at LACMA capture grit and vitality of the Latino experience

It’s a hot night on the highway near the Texas-Mexico border. Up ahead in the distance a red neon blinks “Honky Tonk.” Hon-kee-tonk. You pull up. A cold beer would taste good, but from the looks of the place you better take off your tie and leave the Ralph Lauren blazer in the car. Hectic music comes oompa out the door. Well, you’ll fit in all right; after all, you’ve got Linda Ronstadt’s “Canciones di mi Padre” album right there in the tape deck. Dos Equis. Order a Dos Equis. Practice your Spanish. Dos Equis, por favor .

You peek in the door and suddenly the scene seems to freeze as if all the figures were cut out of cardboard. A stringy blond woman in cowboy boots dances with a trucker with a red mustache and a nose to match. They seem to be stuffed into one pair of Levis. An old drunk lounges limply at the bar and a lady who looks like she lives on a diet of tequila, hot peppers and men swings provocatively. She knows she’s a number even if nobody else does.

Maybe this isn’t the place for you after all. You turn back to the car, which has somehow been transformed into a death wagon. A skeleton sits smiling hungrily in the driver’s seat.

The hallucination fades. In reality you are at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art standing in front of Luis Jimenez’s raunchy “Honky Tonk” tableau in the exhibition “Hispanic Art in the United States,” a traveling show of 30 painters and sculptors that will probably cause a lot of talk before it closes April 10. There is a tendency these days to mix up art and real life so it’s possible to imagine some up-scale Latin-Americans being offended by the gritty underbelly sensibility that dominates much of the show. This certainly is not the cosmopolitan Latino culture you see as you watch the beautiful Graziella Rincon anchor the news on cable TV’s GALA channel.

There may be art folks who find themselves indignant at the idea of artists being shown in a prestigious forum “just because” they are Latino or conversely worried that the artists are being ghettoized by being grouped this way, the way people used to worry when there were a lot of shows of so-called women’s art.

One thing is sure: Whatever aspect of this show anybody chooses to get touchy about will be nowhere nearly as complicated as the reality behind this art. After all, Latino culture outside the United States is already a richly interwoven historical stew. When you mix that with the other national and racial layers that make up U.S. culture you have an embroidery of countless resonances.

Significantly, a previous exhibition devoted to L.A. artist Billy Al Bengston was just coming down as the Latino show was being installed. Bengston’s rich, hot palette and love of the decorative blended so seamlessly with the Latino-inspired art you got the feeling he could not have gotten along without the exuberant Latino sensibility that is so much part of the local environment. At the same time a real low-rider 1950 Chevy by Gilbert Lujan was being unloaded to be presented as an artwork called “Our Family Car.” It would probably not be swallowable as art if it were not for Bengston’s pioneering the notion of the aesthetic significance of adolescent hot-rod culture. And don’t forget Ed Kienholz’s “Back Seat Dodge ’38.”

The Latino show is loaded with influences that range from German Expressionism to Neo-Expressionism, all intermixed with traditional Latino popular arts. There are carved santos and macabre paraphernalia from El Dia de Los Muertes. Rudy Fernandez’s painted relief, “Mocking Me,” shows a bird perched on a cactus near a patched heart and a big knife. It is the visual transcription of a million Mexican ballads where the lover’s corazon has been stabbed by disappointment. If the show is vulnerable to the charge of not being very original, so is every comparable exhibition in these less-than-inventive times.

What we really get from this ensemble is a distinctive mythology, a kind of barrio poetry whose inescapable authenticity makes considerations of politics, sociology and history seem as petty as a frozen dinner.

It is a vision of life lived closer to the bone than most middle-class people dare to contemplate. It has an almost medieval immediacy alternately bejeweled and austere. Pedro Perez makes golden crosses encrusted with glass gems and jollied up with leering cartoon characters. Roberto Gil De Montes’ little painting “Recuerdeme” portrays a cadaverous smoker in a carved frame decorated with skulls. In this world there are no buffer zones between gaiety and violence, affection and cruelty, vivacity and death. Here is life watched with one eye on the raw meat of reality and the other rolled backward in its socket staring at magic wafting from monstrous flowers like purple perfume.

It is impossible to look at the show and not think of Latin America’s magic realist literature by Jorge Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The earliest artist here is Martin Ramirez, who died in 1960 in Auburn, Calif., after 30 years in a mental hospital. His art--all made during his illness--is grossly pigeonholed as psychotic with its compulsive linearity and quality of a haunted mind-map, but it has such imaginative originality that it was influential on the Chicago artists Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilson.

Ramirez’s visionary insight recurs variously throughout the exhibition. Felipe Archuleta and Gergorio Marzan both sculpt animals in a folk-like style. Marzan’s have a carnivalesque glitter, Archuleta’s the rawness of tribal sculpture. Both are striking for their lack of sentimentality. Animals are not cute when one knows them intimately as a source of food and as minor deities inhabited by powerful spirits. The primitive belief in the interchangeability of human and animal souls shows up so often as to be an inescapable--and certainly spontaneous theme. It is humorous in Gilbert Lujan’s barrio world where young dandies and their girls are all stylish dogs. It is satirical in Paul Serra’s “Mad Dogs,” where canines are joined by a guy with a briefcase to bay at the moon. Arnoldo Roche’s “Spirit of the Flesh” looks almost too much like some poor chump being transformed into The Wolfman. This art is a permeable membrane where reality and fantasy soak into one another.

Any Angeleno will recognize Carlos Almaraz’s freeways and languid parks but the fact that he understands our hallucinations of molten sunset water and cars bursting into flames is something of a surprise. People easily become archetypes in this art. Cesar Augusto Martinez paints iconic portraits of the gentle implacable good ol’ boys of the barrio. In “Hombre que le Gustan Las Mujeres” he shows a fat guy wearing a skinny mustache and his undershirt. The Virgin Mary is tattooed on his chest, a sweet young thing on one arm and a naked vamp on the other.

John Valadez paints a girl with a butterfly tattoo right below her crucifix necklace. Her mocking eyes are made up as for an Aztec ritual and she is as compelling and scary as the pachucas who used to wander Los Angeles’ Broadway after World War II.

This aesthetic is not new. There is a street-gang mentality that runs through it linking the old pachucos to the new marielitos. Look at Frank Romero’s “The Closing of Whittier Boulevard” with its face-down between the cops and the low-riders. It runs from the saturated romanticism of Valadez’s “Beto’s Vacation” to the stark restraint and starved devotion of Carmen Lomas Garza’s little folk paintings of family life. Her world is one that gets rinsed out in the sink every night so it will be clean and sweet in the morning.

Anybody who looks at this art and thinks that the government should run right out and start a slum-clearance project has missed the point. Art is about the distillation of reality even if the liquor is as rude as pulque. Yet we do know certain things. We know that a pristine low-rider on the freeway is going to get off in about five stops but a black Mercedes limo can be going anywhere. If somehow the tattooed guy in Martinez’s painting gets off a 747 at De Gaulle Airport he may be more likely to be detained at customs than the blue-eyed Mexican with the gray topcoat and briefcase. Unless, of course, he is a rock star.

The question of whether any Latin American artists have left the aesthetic of the barrio for the aesthetic of the mainstream presents itself naturally, even if it doesn’t make any difference. Well, of course, they have.

Ibsen Espada paints in the fashion of a late European Abstract Expressionist, and Carlos Alfonzo looks like Jackson Pollock just before the drip paintings. Patricia Gonzalez puts one in mind of Jennifer Bartlett, and Manuel Neri joins Bay Area figurative art to ancient Greece.

Maybe Robert Graham is the most surprising artist at this party. His pristine bronzes of nude females appear to have escaped not only the influence of the barrio but also the fingerprints of the mainstream. He has achieved a species of absolute distinction by doing something perfectly simple--sculpting the iconic female nude just right.

Yet in this company he fits in with surprising ease, like the prodigal come back from a European university, suave and cosmopolitan but relaxed in the old casa. He shares the prevailing preoccupation with physical vigor, iconic archetypes and magical obsession. He reveals a general quality of Hispanic art that is surprisingly muffled in the rest of the show--goggling virtuosity in drawing the human figure. It’s in the Latino legacy, from Mayan genre figures to Goya’s prints to Covarubias’ caricatures and Esteban Maroto’s comics.

You can pick up some of that pyrotechnical virtuosity in Gronk’s Expressionist paintings, but it’s covered up as if awkwardness were deemed more macho than acrobatic mastery. That may be a downside of a laconic barrio aesthetic.

“Hispanic Art in the United States” is a poetic success that inevitably opens onto a universal artistic and human dilemma. When we grow up do we stay loyal to the old neighborhood gang or do we move to the big city?

This special issue was edited by David Fox, Sunday Calendar assistant editor.