‘"Splitting Aguas: The Eighth Annual Young Latino Artists Exhibition"’

"Splitting Aguas": Something to Say

The world is in the Dumpster.

There it is, painted right on the wall just inside the front gallery of Mexic-Arte Museum: a rather glum-faced globe with cartoon features sunk inside a large, industrial waste bin. Sam De La Rosa includes the image in his site-specific mural, From a Hatred of All You Have Been Taught, This House Was Burned Down and the Family Left to Rot, yet even without his explicit graphic you might take the same impression from the art in "Splitting Aguas." Throughout the exhibition -- Mexic-Arte's eighth annual showing of works by Latino artists under 35 -- there's a sense of our planet being trashed, our society having gone straight down the tubes.

Across the gallery from De La Rosa's mural is a series of woodcuts by Miguel Aragón, which, with their bright, shining sun and fluffy clouds and cutely rendered chickies, duckies, puppies, and kitties, might be mistaken for illustrations from a preschooler's storybook. But in each image the dominant figures are men beating on or menacing a person on the ground. The violence undercuts the sweetness of the animals and setting, delivering a sharp rebuke to those who try to paint the world as a pretty place. The reality is ugly and brutal, a feeling that Aragón carries through in his sculptural CLASIFICADO, a group of lithographs bound in an etched copper cover, before which are set bullet shells and pages with blood spattered across their text and photographs of bullet-riddled cars and dead bodies. They offer grim but potent testimony to the vicious industries that trade in human lives.

Violence, albeit of a less realistic kind, also figures prominently in some large paintings by Elizabeth and Maurice Treviño. In one, a mounted warrior, his wild eyes glaring from his armored helmet, stabs a Viking from behind, sending a geyser of crimson erupting from his back. In another, a farmer, chewing on a weed, grips a rooster tightly in each of his fists, blood dripping from their necks onto a bright-pink pig, whose wide eyes suggest his sudden realization that he may be next. The exaggeration of the figures and their treatment -- heavily outlined, with Day-Glo colors laid down ultra-smoothly -- remove the images squarely from reality; they're trippy variations on fantasy and folksy images -- Frazetta on acid, Thomas Hart Benton by way of Warner Bros. -- and as such are perversely fun. Still, bloodshed is bloodshed. Cartoon stylishness notwithstanding, these paintings offer a dark take on life, man as brute.

The human race comes off little better elsewhere in the show. In Jorge Javier López's drawings, the figures have been partly erased or sketched without ears or hair, and parts of their bodies are grossly out of proportion: swollen lips and feet, thick forearms or calves, massive heads. With their breasts and genitalia exposed and hands extended toward some figure or thing, they appear like freakish ghosts, haunting and haunted, desperately reaching for some connection to life. The figure in Lisa Alvarado's color photographs, alone in front of storefront windows, suggests a similar isolation, her only contact with things reflected in or behind glass. She might be a cousin to the subject of De La Rosa's I Have Turned to You for Support (in My Time of Need): a person staring longingly at a hamburger floating before her -- yet another insatiable consumer of Fast Food Nation.

While it might sound depressing so far, "Splitting Aguas" is no downer. Curators Aldo Valdés Böhm and Arturo Palacios have brought together artists whose fierceness of voice is invigorating. These are artists with something to say and the determination to be heard, and they often speak out with a refreshing wit. Pablo Rojas Duarte comments on our appetites in Serving Treatment One by setting a steel bowl full of sweets on a table between a bathroom scale on the floor and a mirror on the wall in front of it; we can't face the temptation without confronting the consequences of surrendering to it. Teresa Cisneros toys with our sense of scale and setting in a series of photographs that put a pair of tiny, pink, egg-headed dolls in various locales that dwarf them: a picnic table, a playground slide. Even De La Rosa, typically blunt in his anger, has his wry moments, as when he paints woodland creatures nestled around a giant hamburger and writes: "It has earned a place among the creations of God."

Yes, this planet is in a sorry state, and we're to blame. But as long as we have these kinds of passionate young artists who can tell us what's wrong with the world, something is still right with the world.