Precious Child Shows an Artist Maturing

Patssi Valdez’s current exhibition at Cal State Northridge finds her a far more pensive artist than she appeared in her beginnings.

Her roots are in East L.A., Garfield High and the conceptual and performance art group of the troubled early ‘70s, Asco. That’s Spanish for “nausea.”

In those days her aesthetic co-conspirators were Gronk, Harry Gamboa Jr., Humberto Sandoval and Willie Herron. Valdez was inclined to express herself through a form of body art that might be called flash-trash glamour.

There’s virtually nothing left of that in “Patssi Valdez; Private Spaces, 1988-1997” at CSUN’s gallery. Most of the 20 paintings are dark interiors of a modest barrio dwelling. People rarely appear except at second hand as lamp base sculpture, photographs, art reproductions or the inevitable Virgin of Guadeloupe. Somehow you get the feeling this is a family home but nobody’s there.

Nobody’s ever there except an extremely precious little girl. She’s inclined to hallucinations that tell her all the inanimate objects are alive. Wood hobbyhorses gallop around by themselves, but this isn’t Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” full of cute talking crockery. Our little girl is a lot smarter and considerably more serious than a cartoon character. She knows that her home looks like a model of unpretentious domestic calm, but she sees trouble and she’s fascinated. Maybe trouble is better than loneliness.

In “Room on the Verge,” brooms sweep by themselves, linens waft out the window while dishes and spoons play malevolent tag. Stripes on the dark green carpet begin to form into a whirlpool. When that vortex gets spinning, the whole space will be sucked into itself. But how can that be? Where will it go? What is it made of? It appears that the little painter girl conceives her world as formed by reassuringly heavy glazed terra cotta. Unfortunately it’s capable of liquefying and running out the drain like an upside-down volcano. There’s a spooky instability about Valdez’s world.

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“Little Girl in Yellow Dress” could be a self-portrait taken from a family album snapshot. The child stands in her party finery clutching a minuscule pink handbag in a tiny white-gloved hand. A blue ball lies nearby, calling our attention to the pavement ominously cracking under the girl’s feet. Decidedly unreliable, Valdez’s planet.

She doesn’t exactly see things like other people. “Room With Masks” depicts a couple of them hanging in a corner above a lamp. Lighted from below, they take on a theatrical eeriness as symbols of the ancient tragicomic war between the sexes. Somehow that endlessly fascinating scenario isn’t what really interests the little girl. Maybe she’s still too young. Her attention is more on the lamp. The base beneath the kitschy shade is the statue of a female deity. She’s the giver of the light.

Valdez focuses more closely on that theme in “Domestic Goddess.” It depicts the Blessed Virgin so large that she easily cradles the entire house in her arms. Maybe that’s why the little girl’s not afraid of all the weird happenings within. She feels protected.

“December” finds her staring out the window of a round room with anxious drapes. The scene outside shows sailboats gliding on a mountain lake in the moonlight. A rose on the sill completes a suggestion of wistful thoughts about unknown romances.

“The Living Room” is a nice pun of a title for Valdez’s life-size installation. It attempts to create the sensation of her paintings without offering them any serious competition. Her pictures, with their resonant saturated color, free an imagination that the installation constricts.

CSUN gallery director Louise Lewis calls Valdez’s pictures “magical” in her brochure introduction. She’s right, but how did they get that way?

Obviously their virtues are distinctive to their maker. But she works in a manner that’s become something of a school style among contemporary L.A. Latino painters. It’s clearly compounded of parts from Mexico’s great muralists and its popular arts plus aspects of everything from cartoons to American graffiti and psychedelic head-shop art.

However, there’s an important artistic influence here that’s gone largely unacknowledged since it came into play in 1960. The seeds were planted locally by UCLA painters of the former Ceeje gallery, like Charles Garabedian, Louis Lunetta and Ed Carrillo. Valdez graciously acknowledges the inspiration in her “The Purple Couch” by painting in a reproduction of a self-portrait by Max Beckmann.

* Cal State Northridge, Art Dome, through Feb. 28, closed Sundays, (818) 677-2226.