Unfinished Work for Art

The Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture is open but not finished. Located on Main Street not far from City Hall, the new showplace is situated in a building that formerly housed a Bank of America branch. The facade renovation is still in progress behind a construction fence, so visitors are obliged to enter via the rear parking lot. That done, they’re rewarded by an inaugural exhibition, “Paul Sierra: A Cultural Corridor.”

Why open when not everything’s ready? Well, that’s not exactly unprecedented. The Museum of Contemporary Art cracked its Temporary Contemporary facility well before its main building was done. Conversely, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art stayed in business during a huge renovation.

Maybe it was just time. The Latino Museum has been officially gestating since 1986, when then-Assemblyman Charles M. Calderon got the bureaucratic wheels slowly turning. He’s now chairman of the museum’s board.

That makes 12 years to get into position to actually do a show. Even at that, the part of the museum that’s now publicly visible is only a fraction of 25,000 square feet of eventual exhibition space. The number, more than double that of, say, the Municipal Art Gallery, bespeaks a fairly expansive vision. What are they up to down there?

According to Latino Museum director Denise Mun~oz Lugo, the museum intends to be a place where everybody can learn about the breadth and variety of the Latino contribution to American life. Even the repository’s name reaches for more than aesthetics. Making connections between art and what passes for the real world is, these days, a worthy and important job. Everything about the place suggests striving for an evolutionary step into the museum mainstream.

Meantime, responsible parties are still puzzling over what to do with the bank vault they inherited. It’s so beautiful they wonder if it can be made into a kind of found-object artwork. It caused a visiting critic to remember the days when he banked in the building and to wonder whatever happened to that cute teller, who turned into an ATM machine.

All of which acts as a reminder that, since beginnings are inherently awkward, the impressions they leave should be taken as provisional.

Paul Sierra, the featured artist, was born in Havana in 1944 and emigrated to the United States when he was 17. Based in Chicago and little-known hereabout, he paints in a style combining the bravura brushwork of the Mexican muralists with the subjective angst of German Expressionism. Traditional by vanguard standards, Sierra’s work sets itself apart with personal intensity and a curious sort of illusive, seemingly inner-directed wit. The 30 or so works on view combine theatricality and thoughtfulness into an imagery not unlike the Latino literary genre of Magic Realism.

Most pictures depict archetypal figures in tropical landscape. Often dark with mystery, they’re clearly involved with the elemental as expressed through earth, air, fire and water, all loaded with symbolic import. “Prometheus,” for example, shows a nude fire-eater blowing flame in the jungle. “Hi Ho, Hi Ho, Off to Hell We Go” depicts a line of Kafka conformist types marching dutifully while a hyena lurks in the underbrush. Meantime we see a man’s feet in an upper corner carefully inching along a tightrope.

Sierra returns several times to the motif of a nude pubescent boy diving into a primal pool. In “Mad Dogs,” a man joins the canines howling at the moon.

There’s sometimes a disturbing expressive disconnect in Sierra’s art. His involvement with fundamental nature seems at odds with implied narrative, whose sources are necessarily cultural. Such juxtapositions make more sense set in Sierra’s biblically derived “Judith” because, like the work of painter Eric Fischl, it takes advantage of domestic staging. Sierra’s preferred juxtapositions are somehow vulnerable to curdling into cliches edged with self-congratulatory cuteness.

Happily, the work itself already demonstrates the solution to the problem. It’s the ancient virtue of keeping things simple. A pure, untitled landscape depicting craggy terrain and roiling clouds allows us to concentrate on a really superb painter.

The impression is furthered by two portrait-like frontal paintings of men in dark, jungle-like settings. An untitled image of a burly red-bearded guy and a “Gentleman With Hand on His Breast” are so straightforward they evoke--rather than talk about--what seems to me to be Sierra’s real leitmotif. The idea that, at bottom, humans are still dangerous animals isn’t new--nothing is--but in such pictures Sierra chillingly imparts the feeling.

The museum’s Monica Torres-Creason is the exhibition’s curator, and she also contributed to a catalog still in preparation.

BE THERE

“Paul Sierra: A Cultural Corridor,” the Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture, 122 S. Main St., through Oct. 9, closed Wednesdays, (213) 626-7600.