New Mexican Artists Highlighted in Exhibit

The city in Francis Rivera’s painting, “Twilight Image,” reveals itself through small, telling details. A crowd files into a church toward the bottom edge of the large canvas. A lone figure frolics in a playground next door. An altercation seems to have taken place on a nearby street corner; a police car has pulled over and an officer is questioning another driver. On the main drag, people mill about in front of a movie theater. Christmas decorations adorn the lampposts. A train passes behind the city center, separating it from a residential district and a neighborhood carnival.

Seen from above, from an imaginary, omniscient point of view, these episodes hint at a single, unified narrative, yet they remain distinct and self-contained. Similarly, Rivera’s painting is but one work among many in a show that surveys an area through the display of its disparate facets.

“Somos Nuevos Mexicanos,” at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park’s Pepper Grove, joins the work of a dozen New Mexican artists of Latino heritage. The show, which continues through Sept. 29, marks the debut of the institution’s new curator, Patricio Chavez, a New Mexican artist himself. Chavez’ selections emphasize the dual nature of contemporary New Mexican art--its link to traditional crafts and its foothold, however weak, in the current art scene.

A stamped tin mirror frame, several humble but dignified wool weavings and a variety of wooden crucifixes and icons, all made in recent years, testify to the endurance and continuing relevance of traditional themes and materials among Southwestern artists. Most of the work in the show, however, speaks in a more contemporary idiom, but little of it argues convincingly for its own enduring role in the world of art.

Tina Fuentes’ paintings straddle the line between abstract and figurative art, but fail to exploit the potential dynamism of that ambiguity. Her bold application of paint and commanding palette of black, white, red and gold yield compositions of surprisingly modest intent. Two paintings by Francisco Le Febre, one a still life and the other a Vietnam war scene, feel equally lifeless. An aggressive, mixed-media wall construction by Jose Garcia tries hard to evoke a sense of history’s incongruous conflations, but ends up by simply bombarding the senses.

A quiet self-confidence characterizes the strongest work in the show, such as Rivera’s painting and the intriguing photographic self-portraits of Soledad Marjon, all titled “Other Women.” Marjon conceals her face in all but one of the images, and smoothes over the particularities of place and time by painting her black-and-white photographs with delicate, muted tones. A dream-like atmosphere results that charges the scenes with rich romanticism, nostalgia and a touch of melancholy.

In one image, she kneels, nearly nude, beneath an Egyptian-style wall hanging. In another, she lies on a patterned rug, wrapped in a white gauze cocoon. Tinted a luminous gold in another print, the gauze encircles her as she sits on the bare metal coils of a bed, her face buried in her knee as if immersed in a poignant memory. Though highly personal, Marjon’s self-portraits also reach into the amorphous realm of collective memory to stir associations of love, death and longing.

In their directness and immediacy, Miguel Gandert’s photographic portraits exist entirely in the present. His image of an Albuquerque couple is a study in contrasts--the woman’s soft, doe-like gaze beside her companion’s upturned, challenging stare, and the pair’s intimacy within a setting hardened by the slashing strokes of graffiti. In another image, Gandert sets a young girl, dressed for her first communion, in a gritty parking lot. In white lace from head to toe, the girl cocks her foot childishly, but the look of tough self-protection on her face belies her innocence.

Bernadette Rodriguez applies campy details to her painted portrait of singer Lydia Mendoza--rhinestones on her earrings and ring, fur on her shoulders and a lace bow tied to the head of her guitar--and sets the image against a solid plane of pink. The subject’s intense stare shatters the frivolous tone of these touches, however, and sets up an arresting tension within the image.

Wisely, curator Chavez did not attempt to present these diverse expressions as part of a seamless continuum of New Mexican art. Instead, like the painter Rivera, he averts the eye from the grand overview and directs our focus to the fragments that give character and flavor to the whole. With so many bland and tiresome works included in the show, that focus begs to be even more selective.