Women Fit for Duty, Out of Shape

The work in “Las (In)visibles: Women Artists of Uruguay” is largely a disappointment. But the exhibition at Cypress College Fine Arts Gallery is nonetheless a sincere attempt at illuminating a culture virtually unknown in this country.

Populated largely by emigres from Spain, Italy and France (genocide wiped out most of the indigenous population by the early 19th century), Uruguay was a model of peace and social progress before a military dictatorship imprisoned, tortured or exiled hundreds of thousands of people from 1973 to 1984.

Judging by awkwardly translated posted statements of the 17 artists in the show--selected by Stacey Westcott, an American who spent time in Uruguay on a University of Minnesota fellowship--the participants are for the most part outspoken feminists who have had to cope with the repression of personal freedoms. But their art from the past 20 years seems overwhelmingly thin and dated. Derivative motifs and flabby spinoffs of Surrealism and Expressionism doom many pieces.

Still, a few works yield a compelling vision of life under political or personal duress.

*

In 1980, leading photojournalist Nancy Urrutia zoomed in on a woman’s protective hand resting on the cheerful applique of a serious-faced little’s girl’s sweater--viewed through the clasped hands of a cordon of cops.

Pilar Gonzalez’s huge mixed-media caricatures skewer officialdom in a gleeful, neo-Rabelasian spirit. In “Caught With His Hands in the Cookie Jar,” a scowling piece of flab in a pompadour peers out of one baleful eye.

Alina Di Natale’s “The Fable of Germ and the Giant” is the work of a gifted fabulist. Against a flat black background punctuated by (phallic) Gothic spires, a deathly pale woman encounters her skinless double; a small landscape of bare trees reveals a pile of eggs.

Diane Mines’ photographic self-portraits bathed in a reddish haze may seem narcissistic--a shot of curled fingers here, an open mouth there. But these images are doubtless meant as hints of repression.

In a different style, her self-portrait from the rear with a lopped-off braid of hair stuck to her back vividly symbolizes the push-pull between tradition and modernity, docility and independence.

* “Las (In)visibles: Women Artists of Uruguay,” Cypress College Fine Arts Gallery, 9200 Valley View St. Hours: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday and Thursday; 10 a.m.-2 p.m. and 6-8 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. Free. Through Tuesday. (714) 826-5593.