Ancient Art Inspires a Modern Man : Art: “The Mexican influence has always been important in my work--the macabre, the grotesque, the idea of death in life.”

Mario Castillo’s odyssey has taken him from the 1960s to the 1990s, from barrio street art to minimalism and beyond, from Mexico to Chicago to Los Angeles.

Throughout this artistic journey, looming from his colorful, tormented mixed-media artwork, one image has dominated: the face.

The primal visages of the Chupicuaro and other pre-Columbian Indian civilizations of Mexico represent more than Castillo’s roots. In paintings that went on display Dec. 1 at the Orlando Gallery in Sherman Oaks, the faces have provided a focus that helped Castillo get his first solo show at a professional gallery at age 44.

Interviewed recently at the Plaza de la Raza cultural center in East Los Angeles, where he teaches art classes at night, Castillo is intense, serious, slightly melancholy. “I’ve been an emerging artist for 20 years,” he said with a touch of irony.

Castillo also teaches art during the day at Raymond Avenue Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles. He likes teaching, but it has forced a part-time dedication to a full-time obsession. Despite his high-profile start as a college student supervising pioneering street murals in a Chicago barrio, despite group shows at museums and universities and scattered acclaim in Latino-oriented artistic circles, recognition has been elusive.

That has been partly a matter of choice, as Castillo points out. For example, he abandoned a post as a University of Illinois art professor in the 1970s when he found he wasn’t cut out for academia-in-the-cornfields And as a graduate student at the CalArts, his ardent immersion in the avant-garde--which included an exhibit of his shaved body hair on slides--raised some eyebrows, a memory that he relishes. (Castillo says he earned the nickname “Oso” or “bear,” as a young man because he is stocky and hairy.)

His restlessness has a cultural foundation, Castillo said. He was born in Mexico, the son of a widowed schoolteacher, and spent his youth in Texas and Chicago. He was introverted, tentative, looking for identity in a cultural limbo--and says he sees the frustration he expressed through art mirrored in the violent “cholo” culture of today’s barrio gang members.

“They don’t want to be Mexican or American. They want to invent their own reality. . . . I never developed strong ties to a place. I was developing my own identity.”

As a student in 1968 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he worked for a city program that sponsored art education for poor children from tough areas. He directed his charges in the painting of two abstract murals structured on pre-Columbian and Northwest Native American motifs in Pilsen, Chicago’s major Mexican-American neighborhood.

“These were kids who didn’t have any background in art at all,” Castillo said.

The murals have been hailed in Chicago as trend-setting examples of “people’s art.” But in an ironic twist 20 years later, Pilsen has shown signs of gentrification and the murals are slated for destruction in a city proposal to turn the building into an artists center.

Castillo pursued graduate study in Los Angeles. This began a period of oscillation between the Midwest and Southern California, along with an exploration of artistic frontiers inspired by artist Marcel Duchamp’s philosophy of “erasing the boundaries between life and art.”

“I went through all the ‘isms,’ ” Castillo said. “Minimal art, body art, conceptual stuff.”

In the early 1980s, after the sometimes rocky years at CalArts and after his abortive career start at the University of Illinois, Castillo found himself teaching, painting and looking for direction.

“I said I’ve got to settle on one thing and just do it. . . . I wanted to go back to my roots. The Mexican influence has always been important in my work--the macabre, the grotesque, the idea of death in life. It’s a very Mexican theme and one I’ve always related to.”

He realized that he was constantly doodling faces--the Mayan and Chupicuaro profiles that had fascinated him in museums and books since childhood He began a new study of the figurines and visual arts of those cultures.

“I thought, what better subject matter? All cultures have done faces. And I can approach it through my roots.”

The resulting work contains traces of the different stages of the odyssey One of the larger works at the Orlando show, an acrylic and mixed-media work on canvas titled “Detour After Van Gogh’s Infatuated Delusion,” superimposes an elongated Chupicuaro face onto a primal jumble of colors and shapes and recurring images of hands and other body parts. In another painting, Castillo pasted his actual body hair onto arms depicted on the canvas.

The title of “Resistance to Cultural Death: An Affirmation of My Past” celebrates his heritage and underscores the pre-Columbian imagery of the silk-screen that will be included in a traveling exhibit of Chicano art sponsored by UCLA. There is also Hindu and Tibetan spiritual imagery in the work.

Castillo hastens to point out that the show at the Orlando came about thanks to the good graces of two energetic sisters named Mary Helen and Rose Mary de la Pena, who put on a Castillo exhibition at their new Institute for Hispanic Cultural Studies in Santa Monica.

While the Orlando show represents a long-awaited breakthrough, it does not signal an end to the teaching jobs or a move from Castillo’s cramped, solitary quarters in a house in South-Central Los Angeles. The area is tough, dangerous and appropriate, he said.

“It’s where the guts of the city are,” he said. “It can be macabre and grotesque, and it’s related to my work.”

His work will soon appear in an entirely new context. An upcoming Spanish-language television advertisement for Coca-Cola titled “Sabor de America” will feature quick shots of 60 Latinos at work and play across the country, among them a fleeting image of Castillo in front of an easel bearing the “Delusion” painting--with a Coke in his hand.

It’s not something the Mario Castillo of the 1960s would have done.

“I wouldn’t have had anything to do with it,” he says, with an uncharacteristically wide grin. “But that’s OK.”

“Chupicuaro Extensions” is at the Orlando Gallery, Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Dec. 29. For further information call (818) 789-6012.