This is a disturbing exhibit. The young artist, a recent MFA from the School of the Art Institute, portrays a world of senseless violence. In the tradition of Francisco Goya, he expresses his dismay with stark and brutal frankness. But unlike his courtly predecessor, no frustrated ideals are invoked - no heroic struggle is suggested. This is not a tragedy - it’s a cruel, mind numbing reality that extends beyond the painting’s stretchers and pictorial plane to enter the viewer’s physical world in layers of thick, sculptured paint.
The subject matter can be as disgusting as fresh corpses stretched out beside a field of cabbages. Even when the artist is only depicting a pile of colorful trash, you’re sure it’s the stuff left behind by murder victims - proabably children. Yet still, the painting/sculpting is notably inventive and beautiful. The soggy corpse that is floating in a river is also floating elegantly across the gallery wall. Severed human heads are placed as carefully across a white sheet as Cezanne might have arranged apples and melons. The unthinkable has become normal - the awful has become aesthetic - and it creates a sense of moral urgency. The killing has got to stop.
Also presented is a series of fourteen self portraits in various degrees of brutal distortion. It’s as if the artist's face were some kind of over ripe fruit which has been repeatedly bashed beyond recognition. The results recall the monstrous self portraits of the aging Francis Bacon or Pablo Picasso. Yet there is a peacefulness about them and the gentler soul of a much younger man who is moved by the pain of others rather than himself. He empathizes with the victims of violence back in Mexico, but he grew up in Chicago, more than a thousand miles away. As a secular, contemporary artist he has chosen to represent a serious social issue. His images, however, often feel more spiritual than political. They seem to belong in a shrine rather than on a newspaper’s editorial page. If he ever feels like representing the bloodied martyrs of Christian iconography, that conventionalized tradition could really use an artist of his freshness and power.
