The Galleries : Santa Monica

Southwesterner Rudy Fernandez drapes Latino perspective on Americana’s frocks, past and present. His paintings and constructions include not only campy neon accents but Pop art cacti abstracted and brushed so smooth they become swaths of pine green spouting erotic, billboard-like desert blooms. Huge trompe l’oeil plastic push pins hold strings of big kitschy beads and feathers done with the hyper-real precision of an OMNI magazine cover. All these sleights of the hand make hybrid references to early American realism, craft and third world curios and suggest the mysterious way art confers acceptable status on one object but pooh poohs another. There’s humor and technical finesse in glistening trout or exotic birds, painted or affixed in wood to look like convincing decoys, and in J. C. Penney animal imitations you might find adorning heartland hunting lodges.

Tucked in each of these works is a tiny winged heart of the sort tattooed on forearms. Inside these, Fernandez paints a little white pictograph of a cactus that looks like those schematic street symbols that tell us to “walk” or “stop.” Like highway proclamations--”food, gas, next right”--the little symbol seems to say “nature, this way.” In its three-fisted insistance on the legitimacy of Latino/cholo culture, that culture’s instinctual ties with what’s left of nature and modern society’s reflexive habit of confusing predigested symbols for the real thing, the tiny cactus emblem stands for the whole of Fernandez’s complex artistic drift. (Natoli-Ross Gallery, 2110 Broadway, to March 11.)