Oaxaca

Los Angeles Herald Examiner
Raúl Guerrero en la Galería Richard Kuhlenschmidt, Los Angeles, CA / Review by Christopher Knight, June 2, 1985

“Guerreroʼs art comes close to B-movie mysticism, but his works rarely plunge over that dubious edge” – Christopher Knight

Raúl Guerreroʼs recent paintings are double-take pictures. They donʼt jerk your head around in a sudden shock of recognition as much as surreptitiously slip the rug out from under you, leaving your equilibrium momentarily suspended and floating. At their best, his paintings are visual conundrums in which a tone of conjecture, rather than conclusions, is sounded.

Remarkably enough, the artist accomplishes this feat through a kitschy veneer in which shallowness is all. A languorous jaguar encountering an ancient wall-painting, a pre-Columbian temple glimpsed through a lush and erotic jungle, a ruined door opening onto a monastic courtyard, an apparitional head surrounded by butterflies and hovering over a still pond − these and other Romantic images of a debased, pulp-novel sort dominate the show. The imagery is orchestrated in a straightforward, iconic frontality, and is rendered in a slick, deadpan, uninflected style, in which no trace of the artistʼs hand is visible. With their graphic look and often exotic subject matter, these paintings enter into territory that is perilously close to cornball metaphysics: They exude a steamy, B-movie mysticism of Aztec and Mayan hidden truths. Rarely, however, do they slip over the edge. In almost every case, the paintings are composed from a close and precise foreground that presses hard against a background remote in time or space, like actors on a stage before a painted backdrop. Any suggestion of a middle ground has been excised.

An abrupt collision thus takes place between immediate sensual, close-at-hand, experiences and the anticipation of a remote, far-off encounter. Perversely, that anticipated encounter is in an arena that is the residue of the past: The background images depict barren desert hills, colonial or pre-Columbian ruins, a waterfall in an ancient forest and the like. The legacy of a communal cultural history is offered as the destiny for future experience. In this way, a sense of impending revelation marks these canvases − itʼs as if an obscuring veil is about to be lifted – but they stubbornly hold their tongues. Guerrero plays on the familiar promise that artistic experience will change your life – and then pulls up short.

The future tense is drained from these paintings, and in its place one finds an acknowledgement that the present is neither free nor unencumbered: itʼs always bounded by beliefs tenaciously pushing their way into the foreground from the recesses of the past. Belief, particularly religious belief, is everywhere suggested in Guerreroʼs chosen iconography of ritual objects and symbols of birth, regeneration and revelation. Yet the disclosure made by his strangely compelling brand of kitsch conceptualism has more to do with faith itself than with faith in a particular doctrine. In these idiosyncratic (and occasionally very funny) paintings, be pries open and splits apart the comfortable reliance on unquestioning assumption that is the nature of faith. Thereʼs no middle ground depicted in these pictures because thatʼs the space the spectator occupies. Between unthinking habit and unfocused desire, Guerrero seems intent on establishing some room in which to move.