Latin Accent

It should go without saying that Latino culture is more than a subterranean force in Ventura County. It’s a vital part of the fabric.

Still, specifically Latino-oriented culture too often appears only incidentally, as a sidebar.

One of the few regular venues for Latino art has been the yearly “De Colores” exhibit at the California Oil Museum (the art space formerly known as the Santa Paula Union Oil Museum). Artist, muralist and Chicano activist Xavier Montes, a Santa Paula native, started the group show in 1994, and it’s still going strong.

Just in time for Cinco de Mayo, the sixth annual exhibit, an engagingly diverse sampling of work curated by John Nichols and Anne Shilton Graumlich, has taken over the back room of the museum.

Center stage here is the work of Jose Montoya, an artist, teacher and labor activist who worked with Cesar Chavez and founded the “Rebel Chicano Art Front.”

His watercolors have a dreamy, vaporous quality, an approach that tints the subject matters in various ways.

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In the piece “No More Drive Bys for This Dude,” the view of a young man in a casket becomes a brooding requiem for misdirected youth.

The style injects ambiguity into the work “Our Lady of the Valley,” a rear view of a large, seated woman idly gazing at palm trees, out of meditation or leisure or both.

Montes himself shows several paintings, celebrating pre-Columbian culture and mythology.

“La Dolores” proudly portrays a woman in a feathery Aztecan headdress, while “El Maguey Mistico” is a more mystical piece, with the apparitional image of a pre-Columbian drummer swirling about a maguey plant, steeped in mystical lore.

Jaime Estrada has, like Montes, worked as a muralist, and he uses big, archetypal imagery: a teary eye and supple lips; a burning, naked warrior figure.

Virginia Ashby Valdez of Oxnard works nicely with papier mache, as evidenced in a relief piece such as “Teotihuacan Mask #3.”

Ernesto Seco, a gifted Mexican-born artist now living in Ojai, shows the pleasant “Drummer Boy,” a surprisingly calm, muted portrait compared to the artist’s more flamboyant and/or edgier work seen around the area. “Mi Amiga Hernandez,” by Ventura’s Maribel Hernandez, is another modest, warm-spirited portrait, exuding friendly appreciation of the subject’s unpretentious beauty. With David Sanchez’s woodcut, “Campesino, en Pie de Lucha,” the artist expresses a way of life in economical terms, via the image of a worker’s worn sandals on hardened soil.

In another expressive corner altogether is the gregarious palette of Juan Madeleno, whose “Getting Even” is a painting of mischievous frogs in an idyllic watery landscape--with a Bud Light can tucked into the picture.

It conveys a sort of satirical surrealism that we might, under the circumstances, stretch to reflect the influence of Latin American magic realism, colored by a subtle dig at corporate America.

DETAILS

“Sixth annual De Colores Art Show,” through June 4 at the California Oil Museum, 1001 E. Main St., Santa Paula. Hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; 933-0076.

Double Trouble: The ranks of actors and musicians who also express themselves through visual art are swollen.

The number of those who do it well, and have something to say in the visual realm, is another story entirely. From that rare category comes the Canadian-born actor Duncan Regehr. It helps, of course, that art has been a part of his creative life for decades, and a dominant medium rather than an afterthought.

Regehr is in Ventura these days mainly in thespian mode, to perform in “The Little Foxes” at the Laurel Theatre, but we also get an enriching glimpse of his visual aesthetic in an exhibition in the theater’s hallways, and it’s well worth a look.

It’s tempting to see theater in the pieces, which tend to read like narrative puzzles or fables begging to be decoded, but they speak most boldly on more strictly artistic, even abstract, terms.

Ambiguities and odd tensions abound in his works, which have textured surfaces suggesting wall friezes but build up beguiling little psychodramas in their iconography. Regehr shows a playful deviousness of artistic means, concocting dream-like vignettes and figures whose details place them somewhere between a dark cartoon world and a scruffy Expressionist’s repertoire.

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In “The Cutter,” themes of sexual tension and the clutch of inhibitions seem to arise, in an image with a man cutting his tie while a sultry, smoking woman behind him is echoed in a doll, also smoking.

In “Orpheus,” a woman watches over a disaffected-looking young man with musical instruments, in a claustrophobic room, an ocean view making its tacit appeal out the window.

And in “Daedalus,” a bald artist marks up a wall with pictographs verging on graffiti, with a Raggedy Ann doll at his feet, while a boy on the beach beyond flies a kite, igniting a sense of impending doom.

Regehr’s curious scenarios invite interpretation, in one sense, even as they elude easy reading.

But in the main, they succeed because they have an evocative and personal visual language to convey, beyond the mysteries of their parts.

DETAILS

Duncan Regehr, through May 8 at the Laurel Theatre (Laurel entrance), 1006 E. Main St., Ventura. Hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., and half an hour before each performance of “The Little Foxes”; 667-2900.