An unfinished exploration
By José Luis Arias and Mary Quagliata

Art Opening
José Luis Arias
Fri, Aug 28, 7pm
Arias Art Gallery
Correo 73
154-9005

These latest paintings are part of a progression, in that I’m going in a new direction. But I’m incorporating some of my old images, placed in a fresh context, with other images added to the mix.

When I was 12, in Sinaloa, I began to scrutinize magazines and advertisements and wondered how I was being affected by the images. I was a great fan of lucha libre, popular Mexican wrestling. The professional wrestler El Santo was my hero—a symbol of power, success, even art. He is still one of my heroes, a personal saint who represents popular culture and refers to a particular time in my childhood. His picture often appears in my new work.

I’m experimenting with fragmentation. The mass media culture shows us parts, never the whole. We have to live with these reality snippets, which merely point to the entirety. You have to look closely and concentrate in order to discern the spiritual, but it’s there. I use natural forms in my paintings, such as beautiful flowers, trees and water, to allude to the spiritual.

These new canvases are quite large, each composed of several rectangles, sometimes six or seven. So the complete image is fragmented. The rectangles vary in size, and at first glance you might not understand why I’ve chosen to juxtapose images.

Within each smaller rectangle is an idea, often borrowed from a previous painting, but I also borrow from other artists, magazines, movies and popular culture. I am an “imagist”—I appropriate recognizable images from Cubism, Abstract Expressionism and line drawing; from Piero della Francesca, David Salle and Warhol.

I’ve been experimenting in depth with sixties magazine photos, mass media photos and concepts reflecting sixties style—dramatic female models and poses, elegant blacks and whites and grays. That era is loaded with iconic imagery and I ask the spectator to follow me backwards in time and then return to the future, with stops along the way.

For example, the theme of one painting is “watching.” Four parts, four rectangles, and the most prominent is an enlarged picture of a fashion model from the sixties. She is “watching” you directly. A man is watching television in another. In a third panel is a comfortable room, nice for viewing art; you are the spectator, “viewing” my painting.

I explore sensation in another painting, with images of cold, hot, movement, taste and sound; some images are invented, some expropriated from other sources.

The media manipulate what we see as beautiful, so I explore it to discover where beauty really lies, to emphasize the beauty of the feminine and its relationship to other things. So an image of a beautiful woman is juxtaposed with a picture of a machine.

David Salle and Andy Warhol have influenced my thinking and my artwork. From Salle I’ve taken the freedom to juxtapose unlikely subject matter and styles. And Warhol! How brilliant to grab a can of soup off the shelf and to paint its portrait. Warhol could see that the media had transformed the can of soup into an icon.

At one time I painted only machines, in a surrealistic manner—machines to symbolize how we have distanced ourselves from nature. Now machines are given a lesser place. They appear as the fabric on the dress of a beautiful woman or the decoration on the shell of a snail. This larger context is an unfinished exploration in seeing and understanding.