Peru’s Szyszlo Presents a Colorful, Dramatic Mix of Cultures

Peruvian artist Fernando de Szyszlo sees art as one of the few doors we have to escape the tragedy of the human condition. With art, one can “forget your individuality, open up to your horizons that you didn’t expect you had inside and feel the grandeur inside of you,” he said.

For Szyszlo, regarded as the leading Peruvian artist of the post-World War II generation, the act of painting is “the motor of a dream, to make physical something that is a feeling, a quest for the sacred,” he said.

His recent paintings on view at Iturralde Gallery, intense, dramatic abstract works rich in color, cannot be divorced from his own time, place and heritage.

Born in Lima in 1925 to a Polish father and a Peruvian mother, he has lived there most of his life, a witness to the anguish in the daily existence of many Peruvians. He describes his country as “a society divided since the Spanish came, where Indians have feelings of frustration and hate.”

His art studies--at the Universidad Catolica de Lima in the 1940s, and in Paris from 1949 to 1955, where he became friends with artist Rufino Tamayo and poet Octavio Paz of Mexico--were dominated by European artists and schools of thought. Interestingly, it was in Paris that Szyszlo recognized the personal significance of his pre-Columbian Latin-American heritage. He returned to Peru dedicated to the notion that his art would reflect his multifaceted roots and his contemporary circumstances.

His close friend, author Mario Vargas Llosa, says of Szyszlo’s art in a catalogue essay accompanying the show: “Perhaps the landscape that has surrounded him during most of his life--the grey skies of Lima, his hometown, the coastal deserts laden with history and death, and the ocean that has been portrayed with such strength in his painting during the last few years--has been as determining an influence in the configuration of his world as the old legacy of the anonymous pre-Columbian artisans whose masks, feathers, capes, clay figurines, symbols and colors are frequently depicted quintessentially in his canvases. Or as the refined audacities, denials and experiments of Western Art--cubism, non-figuration, surrealism--without which Szyszlo’s painting would not be what it is.”

Among the 15 works are several paintings from the series “Viento Obscuro / Paraca” (Dark Wind/Winds of Sand) and three from the series, “Mar de Lurin” (Sea of Lurin). Mysterious visions of his home landscape, they contain mysterious, totem-like figures holding their own among the elements.

Literature has also significantly influenced Szyszlo. His “Duino” series refers to Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” “I’ve always been interested in angels. In ‘Duino Elegies,’ Rilke says every angel is terrible, that there is a terribleness of beauty,” he said.

A compulsive worker--”I couldn’t live without painting,” he said--he views a painting series as “a group of failures. I’m striving to express feelings, to make objective something that is totally subjective, but I haven’t done it yet. When I see a Rembrandt, I realize that everything is there. But we are not so whole like people then,” he said of 20th-Century humankind. “We are fragmented. We don’t believe in anything. So our art is fragmented.

“Before, misery was picturesque. Now we know what it means,” Szyszlo said, referring to our media that instantly inform us of local and global atrocities. “It’s hard to be really happy when you see what is going on about you. Maybe information is going to kill us.”

“Fernando de Szyszlo: Recent Paintings,” is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through May 29 at Iturralde Gallery, 154 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles. Call (213) 937-4267.

COMMUNICATING FUNCTION: Painter Ron Rizk searches for fragments of people’s lives in junk and antique stores. In his quest for objects that appeal to him, he looks for things that have had a function, perhaps even an absurd one. “My function is to communicate how an object could be used,” he said.

Using highly saturated color, he has created odd but sensuous still-life-like worlds in 10 new trompe l’oeil paintings on view at Ovsey Gallery. Contained within painted windows, boxes and other niches, they are at once nostalgic, humorous and sobering.

“A Sight to Be Holed” features a rock gun--a toy gun contraption on the market at the turn of the century--which has propelled numerous rocks at a target. They lie strewn about. A pair of goggles hangs on an adjoining wall, not far from an image of a still whole eye.

In “Runaway Catch,” a wood fish decoy rests in the back of a toy truck that stands in front of a pink curtain, as if on stage. Beyond the curtain are touches of outdoor landscape, possibly a meadow, that look inviting.

Landscapes in the form of vintage postcard-like images open a view to the outside world in such paintings as “Brushes and Beaks.” It contains three thick, lush brushes that resemble the hairdo of the profiled man also pictured. His nose is not so different from the beak of the bird in the image. The postcard shows people frolicking in the ocean.

Some of the objects in these paintings seem so real, one may feel the urge to touch them. Rizk brings his own illusionistic sense of history to them, and entices viewers to do the same thing.

“Ron Rizk--New Paintings” is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through May 15 at Ovsey Gallery, 170 S. La Brea, Los Angeles. Call (213) 935-1883.

UNEASY AIR: Barbara Kassel’s representational paintings on view at Tatistcheff Gallery have their deceptive aspects. First appearing to be straightforward depictions of landscapes and interiors ranging from the endless cornfields of Iowa to views of Martha’s Vineyard and The Veldt in South Africa, one soon discovers an uneasy air to most of the 25 paintings.

Although based on real places, there exists a dream-like (perhaps nightmarish) quality to these finely detailed, colorful exteriors and interiors that seem almost surreal. One senses that something is about to happen in images such as “Moonlight,” where an empty veranda provides access to the ocean. Or maybe it already happened, and the messy details have been concealed.

In “The Border,” Israel and Lebanon are separated by an interior suggesting an interrogation room. In several other paintings, Kassel juxtaposes an interior and an exterior on the same canvas, making them appear like separate paintings. Yet the inside bears a relationship to the outside. Viewers can inhabit these intriguing scenes devoid of people and try to uncover their tales.

“Barbara Kassel, paintings” is open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through May 15 at Tatistcheff Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica. Call (310) 395-8807.