Generation Overlap

A span of more than 50 years covers the ages of the three artists in an intriguing show at CSUN’s Performing Arts Center gallery, “Raices: Roots, Tres Generaciones,” but there is plenty of common ground between them.

Veteran Frank Martinez, the midcareer artist Lalo Garcia and the young Ricardo Ortega, each in his own way, maintain an abiding interest in dealing with the Mexican American experience and retracing roots from pre-Columbian life to the present, as an ongoing process. In some way, the interests and styles related to their various ages are surprising.

Martinez’s work is the most abstract, using a post-Cubist formal approach to different ends.

“Sat. Night #1” depicts musicians at play/work, as organic forms lost in the rhythmic ooze. “Los Veteranos de 1910,” conversely, is a larger, denser composition whose brown hues and knotty design this time connotes struggle rather than festivity.

Ortega, on the other hand, relies on fantastical style, combining methods of realism with subject matter that relishes symbolism. The theme of strained romance emerges via the symmetrically organized “Unidas del Corazon,” with lovers separated by a string of thorns and surrounded by hearts (both the literal organ and the popular valentine version), flames and a full moon.

But the artist also delves into religious iconography in two triptychs, one considering the pre-Columbian “Birth of the Sun,” the other a more typical Catholic portrayal of the Virgin Mary.

Garcia’s work has a lighter air, whether in the variations of style in depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe, a warm-spirited portrait of a peasant woman toting a burdensome vessel on her back, or in an affectionate tribute to Cesar Chavez.

In that work, the labor hero’s benevolent face is surrounded by vignettes of Mexican American life and suggests that the artist’s experience in mural painting has trickled down to his studio work.

“Raices: Roots, Tres Generaciones,” through Dec. 20 in the lobby of the Performing Arts Center, Cal State University Northridge. Monday-Friday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; also open one hour before any performances.