Undertones Are Key to Installations

Like much current art with a social agenda, the wall installations of Paul Maurice feel didactic and cool. They aim to enrage, with their accounts of racism, injustice and violence toward blacks, but their tactics are restrained, often to the point of dull indifference.

The Portland artist’s work, now at Sushi in a two-person show with Tijuana artist Hugo Sanchez, has powerful and ominous undertones, but these emerge to their fullest only in one of the works on view, “Branch.” Here, as in most of Maurice’s work, a text panel leaning against a wall describes an actual incident involving the mistreatment of blacks.

The story is told of a black prisoner denied a trip to the bathroom. The denial led to an argument, which led to his being chained, gagged and his head taped and bandaged in punishment. Ultimately, the prisoner died of suffocation. Maurice recounts the incident in direct, reportorial style, with no anger-induced adjectives. Instead, he expresses his outrage at the racism latent in today’s law enforcement by creating a parallel with the past.

Across the wall supporting the text panel, Maurice has mounted a large tree branch, fastening it to the wall with the kind of industrial-strength tape used, perhaps, to swathe the prisoner’s head. Above the branch, Maurice has written the words, “We don’t hang them anymore.”

This phrase, in conjunction with the 1986 account on the text panel, stabs effectively at claims that equal justice for blacks has improved or even arrived. Maurice makes it clear in this potent pairing that the situation is as bleak as it has ever been--only the methods of suppression have changed, from blatant, public execution, to more subtle, institutionalized forms of torture.

Maurice’s other works in the show similarly combine wall texts with enlarged photographic reproductions and real objects, such as shoes, shirts and flags. None grip the viewer as poignantly as “Branch,” however, with its unwieldy, once-living branch pressed to the wall in forced submission. The dried, drooping leaves give the prisoner’s unnatural death an urgency and powerful, metaphoric presence.

Hugo Sanchez’s painted mural on unstretched canvas, as well as his etchings and pastel drawing, are also thick with metaphor and symbol. But, unlike Maurice’s work, the links between these symbols and reality are not clearly defined. Sanchez evokes the political and historical dramas unfolding in Latin America in his visually rich and striking works, but more concrete meanings remain evasive to the viewer unfamiliar with these continually evolving plots.

Sanchez’s large mural is untitled, but its imagery and theme are related to an etching nearby, entitled “La Ultima Cena de America Latina” (The Last Supper of Latin America).

In the middle of the mural sits a Christ-like figure, with the silhouette of Mexico, Central America and South America imprinted on his tunic. His stoic gaze belies the dynamic swirl of activity and emotion around him--the superman figure, with hammer and sickle emblazoned on his chest, the flame-breathing horse, the crocodile munching on a monkey, and the flying contraption bearing a flag with the word “Mexx.”

An untitled pastel drawing by Sanchez also features a dense mosaic of human forms, rendered in a rapturous palette of magentas, violets, greens and yellows. The drawing’s colors and its contorted figures evoke a passion and turmoil even more extreme than the mural. All of Sanchez’s works here are absorbing, however vague their interpretation, for the artist assesses his culture’s character with a potent mix of satire and sincerity, pain and pride.

* Both artists’ works remain on view at Sushi, 852 8th Ave., San Diego, through Feb. 23.

Wall Works: “Objet d’Art,” at the Thomas Babeor Gallery, features new wall works by San Diego artists Jay Johnson and Robin Bright. Both artists share a preoccupation with formal issues of surface, mass, line and shape, but in his most recent work, Johnson reveals new intimacies, psychological and social concerns.

Johnson’s 1991 wall sculptures trade the elegance of his earlier, copper-sheathed works (several of which are on view here) for a more casual, quirky humor and extend his playfulness with form into a new arena of verbal-visual punning.

In his “I Ball,” for instance, Johnson has painted the letter J in various styles across the surface of a wooden sphere, charred the bottom of the sphere and mounted it high on the wall, with a black tassel hanging from the metal mount. Delightfully acrobatic in its references, “I Ball” is something of a self-portrait of the artist, equating the round eye with the I of his identity, as represented by his initials painted on the sphere.

The sphere shape and the lightly philosophical tone of “I Ball” are central to the rest of Johnson’s new work, too. In “Insolvable,” he poses the question of global unity by breaking a sphere with a map-like surface into chunks, then partly reassembling them, in the manner of clunky, ill-fitting puzzle pieces.

In “Easy Puzzle,” Johnson smothers the sphere with phrases in red and black, repeating “I love, he loves, she loves, we love, they love” across most of the surface, but also throwing in a discordant phrase such as “they don’t care or she never forgives.” The sphere here is split like an orange, with its sections sliding apart. The “Easy Puzzle” is not so easy after all, nor is it easy to fit such conflicting emotions into a coherent, satisfying whole.

Johnson is still preoccupied with the shape of things, but now the psychological contours of a situation are as important to his work as the geometric ones. The shift has humanized his work and endowed it with a refreshing new dimension.

Robin Bright’s sensibility has shifted little since his last show here in 1988, though the form of his work has evolved to become even more precise and attractive.

Bright is still mining the rich intersection between painting and sculpture in wall works that are framed but not entirely flat. They function as both windows, referring the gaze to another world, and objects in their own right, but this ambiguity is only mildly interesting.

The works on view here are part of the artist’s continuing “Hector Vex” series, and they abound in cool elegance. Made of steel and plaster, they recall the ornate patterns and tracery of Islamic architecture and tile work. They play a bit with the tension between the ancient and the modern--in the contrast between rusted and polished steel, or between hand-hewn patterns and high-tech geometry--but these internal dialogues are quiet and limited.

* “Objet d’Art” continues at the gallery, 7470 Girard Ave., San Diego, through March 9.

Tijuana Realm: An earthy blend of sex, commerce, desire and despair is concocted nightly in Tijuana’s clubs and dance halls, according to the newest body of work by San Diego artist Raul Guerrero. The milieu that Guerrero defines in his paintings and drawings now on view at the David Zapf Gallery in San Diego through Feb. 23, is, indeed, gritty, but also otherworldly and fantastic, a realm of extremes and escapism.

“Aspectos de la Vida Nocturna en Tijuana B.C.” (Aspects of the Night Life in Tijuana B.C.)” is an engrossing, difficult show. Guerrero’s intense, jarring palette and his fluid painting style are easy to savor, but his subjects are often harder to swallow. Women perform nude on stage, subject to the groping hands of the club’s male patrons. Others dance for a price, but not necessarily with a smile. And men collapse on the bar after too many beers.

The psychological and sociological dynamics of these situations are not easy for the outsider to discern, but they begin to reveal themselves in Guerrero’s larger, more complex works.

In “Club Guadalajara de Noche,” for instance, scenarios of bought and real affection are played out across 14 feet of canvas. At the bar area, on the right, a man carrying a stack of hats for sale and two seated women display their wares with equal, casual candor. Guerrero paints both of the women in electric colors, with red and purple hair, their skin glowing green and blue.

On the dance floor across from them, couples move beneath a canopy of colored balloons and confetti. Several women, at nearby tables, wear the glazed, disengaged stare that comes with doing tedious work, while others seem fully, willingly in sync with their partners. The painting scans a panorama of emotions, within a stunningly rich range of colors.

Another, smaller painting, “Group of People in Molino Rojo,” has the same sweeping, narrative feel to it. Here, a cluster of women is flanked by two young men looking hungrily about. The impact of the entire painting hangs, effectively, on the expression of one woman, who stands in the center with a cigarette in one hand, and her other arm folded across her chest. Her face, half a warm chestnut color and half a cool, smoky blue, exudes boredom, resignation, perhaps even disdain for her situation. As those around her act, she reflects, and for a moment, Guerrero has caught her soul.

Unfortunately, not all of the works in this show sustain this level of energy, tension and complexity. Several paintings focus on a single subject or isolated vignette, such as a nude dancer or a man reaching beneath a woman’s dress as she sits on his table. These, too, Guerrero paints with a racy, searing palette, but they never come alive like the more fleshed out panoramas for the simple--however quibbling--reason that the artist has painted these men and women with their eyes shut.

Despite the extremity of their actions, the closed eyes deny all access to these characters’ spirit, their mood, their intentions. Though this may be part of Guerrero’s strategy to describe a mode of survival under harsh conditions, ultimately, it makes the artist’s own perspective feel neutralized and evasive.

In Guerrero’s last body of work, his subject is the Italian city of Venice, painting it though the filter of history, legend and myth that has come to define it. In the Tijuana series, the artist relies entirely on direct observation rather than received information. At its best, “Aspectos de la Vida Nocturna” is a penetrating journey into an unfamiliar scene, through the web of needs, hopes and satisfactions that attract people to it.

* The exhibit continues through Feb. 23 at the David Zapf Gallery, 2400 Kettner Blvd., San Diego.