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Group Show
At van der Plas Gallery
Jonathan Fritz
Lulu Galindo
Luis Lujan
Jorge Valdes
Frank Daykin
July 8, 2005
Friday’s windswept, rainy evening provided a welcome opportunity to survey a small showing of four artists’ works in the van der Plas Gallery, upstairs in Pier 17 of the South Street Seaport. The four have some commonalities and many points of individuality. Two (Galindo, Lujan) are native Mexican. Three (Fritz, Lujan, Valdes) live in New York full time. Three are Hispanic, and all of them create works that interweave autobiographical features cleverly into their art pieces. They all create accessible, affordable pieces that now have a chance to be seen and acquired by the throngs of passersby who visit the Seaport on any given day.
As Flaubert said: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” when he was asked how he could have possibly gotten inside the head of a sadly married French woman to create such a true and moving portrait in his novel. It is good to be reminded that all creation is, of necessity, autobiographical, if one knows how to read the cues. Nevertheless, good art stands on its own as well, even in the absence of explanations and/or the artist him- or herself.
Luis Lujan, a multi-talented, self-styled “urban archaeologist,” was immensely moved by the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and he marks a turning point in his artistic evolution to those fateful, fretful days. His esthetic involves found objects, street materials, and other ordinary daily objects assembled into collages that often resemble New York cityscapes. Only a closer look reveals that one of the little skyscrapers in one of them is actually a vial filled with 9/11 ashes, which were omnipresent in lower Manhattan for weeks after the attack.
Lujan’s other beautiful work in the gallery is a suite of black and white urban photos, “full of emptiness” as the artist so poetically called them. Stark architectural features, such as lampposts with cracked globes, often inhabit the center of the field of vision, around which are vacant streets or abandoned warehouses. It may all sound mundane, but his eye for black and white tonal values makes each view a little poem for those who love their city and prize its quiet, undeveloped places and desolate frontiers.
Lourdes Galindo, who uses the art name “Lulu,” is a gifted pianist as well as painter. Some of her work makes explicit reference to her native Mexico and its traditional folk art, such as the large portrait of her sister or the iconic Santa Guadalupe surrounded with rays of light. However, the more interesting work is in the form of several diptychs, clearly narrating the conflicting emotions of being a single female immigrant pianist in a large city. The most violent, titled “Vomiting Piano,” shows a woman from whose teeth undulant piano keys are spitting forth.
In other, more peaceful visions, a lone female is practicing the piano high atop the Empire State Building, whose spire is piercing through the top of the canvas onto the second (round) panel of the diptych. The music curls upward like a white ribbon of purity and peace around the spire and all the way to the moon (in the round canvas). A self-portrait depicts Lulu practicing on the ribbon itself, the keyboard shorn of its black keys, one can still make the association. An expressionistic close-up fragment of piano keys alone seems blood stained. Yet another self-portrait shows the artist reaching fiercely, and hurling her brush defiantly toward the outside of the round painted space.
Jonathan Fritz is a Connecticut born artist who proudly announced that he now supports himself entirely through his visual work, and has stopped tending bar. It is easy to see why in his accessible, commercially appealing work. Quality and salability are not mutually exclusive. He has years of experience as a child educator and book illustrator, all of which is evident in his wide-eyed “Pop” influenced work. Bright colors and thick textured impasto acrylic techniques are his signature.
Nevertheless, Fritz’s cartoonish figures are actually self-portraits, with his idiosyncratic one green and one blue eye. Even in a sunny seascape, the sky is rendered in a surprising black, adding ambiguity to the work. In a series dealing with the end of a relationship, his face is divided in half down one of the edges of the canvas, the likeness is only completed when two or more are seen hanging together. Fritz has founded a small painting school for young children in Brooklyn and is to be commended for that. After all, future appreciators of art are made that way.
Cuban-born Jorge Valdes’ work uses resin and asphalt as well as acrylic to create great textural variety. He engages in a relentless process of self-editing, in which larger paintings (often of whimsically colored houses huddling together) are whittled away to one or more select areas that he deems really good. The remains may be painted over with a mysterious sky, or sometimes excised completely, to leave behind a much smaller work. More artists ought to have the good sense and courage to operate this way. His best panel in the show is a “Last Supper,” in golden and earthy tones that evoke the stylization of Byzantine art without copying or being a cliché.
As the evening developed, more and more enthusiastic supporters came to see the work and congratulate the creators. The gallery owners even provided a live jazz and blues guitar duo, adding a lovely prestige to the event. Clearly, there is great vitality in the New York visual art scene, and young people still have very personal visions they persevere to express. Thank goodness. And thank goodness for insightful gallery owners as well, with eyes to appreciate.
(See a Mexican Art Museum in Chicago).
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