ART REVIEW : 17 Visions in Mexican Exhibit

“Seventeen Contemporary Mexican Artists” at USC Fisher Gallery avoids pitfalls that plague special interest theme shows. The art work is neither apologetic nor heavy-handed placard-bearing-for-a-cause, nor does it deny its origins and ape the international mainstream in a play for credibility.

Despite some unevenness--to be expected in more than 100 works--the 17 artists speak in personal voices and express their culture in sensibilities that are both spiritual and profane.

Among photographs, Gerardo Suter’s chemically manipulated depictions of outstretched, cropped nudes cradling obscure objects are a highlight. Flor Garduno’s black-and-white surreal personages look like vignettes from a Luis Bunel dream sequence--some poignant, others pointless (“Butterfly Girl”). Salvador Lutteroth’s Cibachrome photograph of a snake coiling a cruciform and Laura Cohen’s black-and-white oddly cropped and angled pools and isolated chairs radiate an eerie mysticism. Only Rafael Doniz makes an overt social comment with a dozen frontal photos of Mexican workers.

Respectable drawing predominates. Rocio Maldonado gives us an ink drawing of a garden filled with fantastic plant life. Sergio Hernandez’s cartoony doodles of decapitation and Roberto Turnbull’s gouached “Devils” are as effective as they are disturbing. Finally, Nahum Zenil makes excellent mixed-media works that are almost exclusively self-portraits. In one, the artist and a male companion are linked at the throat by a hangman’s noose.

The macabre charm of wonderful mixed-media drawings depicting menacing little bottles from a series called “Risk and Faith” by Magali Lara inject a welcome bit of humor.

As for sculpture, it demonstrates subtle connections with land and process that have always marked Mexican crafts and art. Adolfo Riestra uses earthen clay and pre-Columbian techniques to make primitive life-size figures that look like Mayan votive statuary. Herman Venegas’ collaged paintings add thick, carved wood Christ figures to canvases; in a piece called “Martyrs,” they are joined by a painted currio lion who splits like a pin a ta releasing a legion of hapless little men. Miquel Cervantes duplicates pre-industrial functional pottery, then shatters and recombines fragments offering the detritus as art. A cynical conceptualist, Adolfo Patino crafts assemblages made from rulers and junk; “Sign,” the best of these, restrains hundreds of alphabet noodles behind glass.

Among painters who paint for the sake of painting, Alejandro Arango is one of Mexico’s most respected expressionists. He makes large neo-primitive paintings that combine bright flat graphic images and the lumbering figuration we used to see in Italian expressionists’ work. Roberto Parodi uses dark umber, sienna and olive green glazes to make churning, broody landscapes where little props like ladders play and tip.

The only staunchly non-figurative works are earth-toned rectilinear acrylic bands by Francisco Lenero that recall parched desert dwellings.

If you want to see what Mexico is turning out in the way of art, stop by this exhibition, which continues to Feb. 18.