ART / Cathy Curtis : Laguna Exhibit of Couple’s Works Shows Expressions of 2 Singular Imaginations

In this rushed era of information overload, pop psychology and the ubiquitous sound bite, we are used to getting a handle on people by using ready-made categories--yuppie, conservative, ethnic.

In the infinitely subtle and highly personal world of art, however, labels are not much help. You don’t get a grip on someone’s work if all you know is that he or she is a conceptual artist or a Neo-Expressionist--or a female or a black or a Latino artist.

In fact, trying to come to terms with work by an “ethnic” artist has all sorts of pitfalls for the unwary. Using the ethnic label to stress the artist’s “otherness,” you may seem to imply that this person needs to be shielded from comparison with “mainstream” (i.e., male or white) artists. You may also be ignoring the delicate balance between “nature” and “nurture” in an artist’s life. What if he or she was born into one culture but educated by another?

On the other hand, if you emphasize the artist’s ties to the broader art community, you risk misunderstanding the heart and soul of the work--including the conflict and isolation that often deeply color the lives of minority members of a society.

These thoughts arise on the occasion of an exhibition of paintings by Carlos Almaraz and Elsa Flores, who are husband and wife, that runs through Nov. 7 at the Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach. Almaraz, a leading member of the Southern California Latino art community, is a painter of phantasmagoric figurative scenes and landscapes alive with riotous color and light.

He was born in Mexico City in 1941 and grew up in Chicago and Southern California, where--after living briefly in a rural Mexican-American village and in upscale West Los Angeles--his parents eventually settled in the East Los Angeles barrio. His father, a laborer, was a fan of such American writers as Jack London and John Steinbeck.

After studying life drawing in high school and attending several colleges, Almaraz moved to New York to check out the art scene. Unfortunately for his painterly exuberance, Minimalism was the style of the hour.

So in 1971, at age 30, Almaraz returned to Los Angeles. After recovering from a severe illness and depression, he went back to the other side--the culture of his heritage. With great gusto he entered the loop of Chicano artists, actors and social activists. He painted murals celebrating Chicano culture. He showed his work as a member of the proudly ethnic-identified Los Four group.

But he also finally finished up his studies at Otis Art Institute (as the Otis/Parsons Art Institute in Los Angeles was then called), a bastion of the white art world. And, according to the catalogue from “Hispanic Art in the United States”--the recent Los Angeles County Museum survey exhibition, in which he was represented--by the late ‘70s he and his colleagues had “gradually detached” themselves from the Chicano art movement.

Almaraz’s present subject matter roams all over the map, snagging lush fantasy and everyday life with the same carousing imagination and skittering brush.

In the painting “End of an Era,” two generously endowed nude women holding parasols pass the time with an artist of indeterminate sex seated at his or her easel; a monkey watches, its tail sketched in with a serpentine lick of the brush. Everyone floats in groundless space that shades from oranges and yellows into blues and greens. Profiled heads--a clown, a Greek god--appear as if conjured up by dream-vision.

Perhaps the “era” in question is the now distant-seeming time when art was a more clearly defined and broadly accessible enterprise--when artists really did work from models, and when the myths and symbols artists drew upon were an integral part of the culture. (Traditionally, for example, monkeys were symbols of lasciviousness.)

In a completely different mood, the painting “Remote Control” shows Almaraz using his powers of painterly exaggeration to find the hypnotic quality of the boob-tube experience. A splat! of paint snaps over the edge of the screen, as if transmitting energy from the remote control device held in the hand of a seated figure with a flat head. Big scribbles of Almaraz’s brush block in the blinding glow of a lamp. Behind the TV set, a giant column rises--maybe just a familiar piece of furniture eerily distorted, maybe an image symbolic of TV-viewing as idol worship.

In a pastel drawing, “Suave Como la Noche,” the artist takes yet another fruitful detour. By wildly exaggerating the colors of this street scene, he puts his finger on the eerie lushness of Southern California by night. Street lights beam triangular pools of green light, the moon is full and fuzzy, and orange tree trunks slice through the fuchsia sky.

Not that Almaraz always hits the mark. In “Dunce’s Dream,” where he gives up his fancy-free brushwork for a cast of firmly outlined figures, he miscalculates. The cast of characters has a shopworn quality, and the tone seems ponderously allegorical. The viewer begins to suspect that what counts in Almaraz’s work is not so much his ideas as his insight into moments of perception--particularly involving light--and his intense dedication to the physical activity of painting.

Flores, who is 14 years younger, was born in Las Vegas and studied at Cal State Los Angeles and at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. She paints in a broad-brushed style that looks, in large-scale compositions, rather unformed and unsure of itself, and whose scope is limited on a small scale. Yet the primal energy of the work reveals Flores’ intense receptivity to the realms of dream and imagination.

In “Dreamscape,” a large, very loosely rendered work, vague figures wander in whirling, paint-spattered territory. Light from a house spreads out of a window like a solid object. A fiery, pop-eyed devil’s head from her “Head Series” paintings bursts like a volcano with hot colors and spatters of paint.

Who is to say what is specifically “Chicano” in these various approaches to painting, and what is not? Do these two artists come by their openness to fantasy, their love of color, their passion for light, their energetic brush styles from some cultural wellspring in their families’ heritage? Or are these essentially personal choices, fed by exposure to art and religion and movies and literature and college psychology classes?

In the end, the sources for art are so complex and diverse that the “labels” make little sense. In an era of well-intentioned surveys of “ethnic” art in its presumed context, it is a pleasure to see this work exhibited all by itself, with no special fanfare, simply as the products of two singular imaginations.

Works by Carlos Almaraz and Elsa Flores are on view through Nov. 7 at the Art Institute of Southern California, 2222 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Friday and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 497-3309.