ART REVIEW : The Gain in Spain: A CSLB Survey of Eight Artists After Franco

This year, Spain hosts the Olympic Games at Barcelona and celebrates the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ first voyage to the Americas. It looks like a country on the brink of a blossoming. Some 17 years after the death of ruler Francisco Franco, the Iberian nation might act as a forecaster of how rapidly the recently crumbled Communist bloc will learn the lessons of a free culture.

Well, according to a traveling exhibition organized by Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum, very fast indeed. A serious and timely effort that comes complete with a 120-page catalogue, “Imagenes Liricas: New Spanish Visions.” Assembled by guest curator Lucinda Barnes, it includes 43 works by eight artists who have come into their own in the post-Franco era. Most are in their 30s.

They’ve clearly paid attention to everything going on in the international art world, particularly among the neo-Expressionists. Unmistakably cosmopolitan, the work generally reflects grounding in Abstract Expressionism updated through intimations of figure and landscape and wafted with traditional mysticism.

There are interesting exceptions. Madrid-based Soledad Sevilla is a veteran maker of installations that would look right at home in Europe’s periodic summer art festivals. Her room-size “It Must Have Been Daybreak” consists of two opposing planes of twine that glow under black light. They create optical illusions of forced perspectives and interlacings resembling some “Star Trek” special effect. In fact, the piece was inspired by her love for the water and light of Granada’s great Islamic architectural masterpiece, the Alhambra. Maybe that’s what eases the intimations of kitsch and lends the work a liquid poetry.

Conceptualism meets nostalgia in the art of Perejuame, who works in a small town near Barcelona. Smaller paint-and-collage pieces such as “Three Dresses” are fashioned from vintage post cards. They sigh with the nostalgia of Joseph Cornell and exude the sweet sentiment of the professional Latin love-letter writer.

Perejuame’s best work is an old metal post-card rack. In it, cards are replaced by mirrors that reflect whatever scene surrounds them. There is something wonderfully rhymed about this evocation of the vivid poignancy of memory and the evanescence of reality.

Everybody else paints.

There is something almost too New York hip about Patricio Cabrera’s art. Juxtapositions of decorative motifs play the semiotics game. Multiple layers of symbolism are suggested. They may be as empty as the oval of rope that suggests a frame for an absent mirror. What redeems this work is its authentic sense of Spain’s Moorish past, the complex designs of tiles that call up the culture’s embroidered thoughts.

The show gives a recurrent sense that there is something deeper at work here than what is provided by its prototypes in trendy international art.

Gerardo Delgado lives in Seville and at 50 is something of a godfather of the new painting. The work is very brushy, dark and fond of attaching actual termite-riddled logs to itself. American art watchers are certain to find hints of such overblown superstars as Julian Schnabel in it, especially a series of three pictures called “The Wanderer.” They contain ghostly images of severed limbs in neo-Expressionist style. Happily, they are executed with a sense of brooding craft that remembers Goya’s black paintings.

A shared sense of responsibility to the past does good for a lot of this work. Madrid’s Juan Carlos Savater makes curious half-visible landscapes that always seem glimpsed behind some odd little detail--a knothole or rock crevice. We think fleetingly of Georgia O’Keeffe( but finally settle on Alfred Pinkham Ryder as Savater’s soul-mate ancestor.

Juan Usle divides his time between New York and his Spanish home in Santander. Something American seems to have rubbed off on him. A wonderful, troubled cobalt blue tide laps around a pie-shaped rock in “Williamsburg Series.” Instead of appearing derivative of the half-dozen American contemporary artists it knows of, it gains density by somehow aligning itself with Winslow Homer.

Jose Maria Sicilia makes no bones about his attachment to Abstract Expressionism but he shares Velazquez’s knack for simultaneously painting the thing and its specter. His white-on-white abstractions appear as smooth waxy poltergeists, translucent atop eroding under-painting that hints at skeletal images of scythes and abandoned sand buckets.

Maria Gomez has a hard time hiding her debt to the Italian neo-Expressionists. One is inclined to tune out her wan, ropy images of beatific folk seeing angels or making art in the wilderness. Something like sincerity holds one to them. Their yellowed atmospheres are more determined than they appear. Finally, you recognize the steadying hand of Picasso during his Blue Period when he toughed out great discouragement.

The good news is that the new Spanish artists learned fast slowly.

Cal State Long Beach, 1251 Bellflower Blvd., University Art Museum, fifth floor , library; to March 15, closed Sunday s and Monday s. (310) 985-5761.