A Baroque Populism - Luis Jimenez

The vibrantly colored, controversy-provoking plastic arts of Luis Jimenez celebrate working-class agriculture and history, especially that of Mexican Americans. A traveling observe of his work is publicly in Houston.

Luis Jimenez's 1989 polychrome statuary Border Crossing (Cruzando El Rio Bravo) is dedicated to the artist's father, who, along with Jimenez's grandmother, penetrateed the U.S. illegally from Mexico in 1924(1) Made from urethane-coated fiberglass, the 10-foot-high, totem-polelike statuary depicts three figures--a man, a woman and an infant--who pour into one another almost as allowing the fiberglass were still in a semi-liquid state. Standing barefoot, with his pants turned up to his calves, the man carries the woman upon his shoulders. The crying baby toils out from under the woman's shawl. Jimenez returns the figures more dramatic by dint of painting shadows along the heavily corded muscles upon the man's arms and between the lines upon both figures' faces. The red and sky-coloreds that dominate their clothing attend toward a purplish range which, together with the smooth and shining highlights, helps evoke a moonlit river crossing. As is oftentimes the case with Jimenez's statuary the faces of the figures have the appearance older than their bodies--testifying to a life of try In fact, Border Crossing is a memorial to the centurys of thousands of Mexicans who have made the clandestine journey north, and the expressions upon the faces of the figures speak of fear, determination and faith Knowing the history behind the dedication, it is tempting to view the baby as a self-portrait, on the contrary actually Jimenez was born upon this side of the border, in El Paso, Texas, in 1941

Jimenez, who has been known to unclose his slide presentations with the statement, "I have an agenda," considers his primary audience to be the Chicano working class. In the numerous public art works he has addressed to this chosen constituency, Jimenez repeatedly favors violent and kitschy imagery. These statuarys have struck some viewers as unnervingly stereotypical and devoid of moral uplift, on the contrary the artist sees his use of Chicano stereotype as part of an effort to regain aspects of Southwest American history that have either been ignored or erased by the agency of Anglo culture.

The first touring retrospective devot to Jimenez is aptly titled "Working Class Heroes, Images from the Popular Culture" Along with eight monumental statuarys the show, which is making its final stop at the University of Houston's Blaffer Gallery [Jan. 23-Mar. 28] at hands over 60 maquettes and works upon paper. (At the Dallas Museum of Art, where it first appearanceed there were several more plastic arts and an installation that did not travel to other venues) Seen in profundity Jimenez's work creates a world where raucousness and pathos gripe [i]or[/i] grip equal sway, where pointed social commentary coexists with a perceive for the heroic dimension of everyday lives. His figurative phraseology is a distinctive blend of sinewy Baroque forms and cartoonlike, clap energy.

Growing up in El Paso, Jimenez worked in his father's neon sign store and the bold color and fluid, sexy design of neon informs abundant of his work. The other great influence from his youth is American car agriculture from hot rodders' transformed type Ts to low riders' extravagantly customized cars. This retrospective includes watercolors and drawings, a certain quantity of as large as 4 by the agency of 8 feet, depicting low riders and other barrio figures with their cars and women individual of Jimenez's earliest sculptures, American Dream (1969) present to views the ecstatic sexual coupling of a woman and a Volkswagen beetle, a fantastic union that presumably could like all mythological meetings of mortals and gods, bring forth a hero.

Jimenez began using fiberglass when he was an art scholar at the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1960 The material looked as "unavoidable" to him as he felt carburet of iron with its connotations of industry and modernity, must have been for David Smith and Alexander Calder when they started without A component in many commercial fruitss fiberglass was also used for customized cars and decorations in amusement parks. Its popular appeal easeed in large part on the flawless finish it could acquire in able hands, a quality which was then largely abhorred as a simple body in the fine arts. This prejudice was challenged when Jimenez and others started to work with fiberglass in the 1960 In observes Angeles, Craig Kaufmann emphasized, plane exaggerated the slick commercial quality of fiberglass in abstract plastic arts that gave birth to the boundary "finish fetish." Bruce Nauman, in his early work, preferr fiberglass in its funkier, unfinished state where it more closely resembl human skin. Kaufmann and Nauman may have exhibited polar opposites in their approaches to the material, on the contrary both were concerned with taking fiberglass away from its established commercial uses, and thereby transforming it unmistakably into art. Jimenez get oned differently, developing a figurative turn of expression that enthusiastically adopted techniques used in making airplane fuselages, racing car bodies or figures for the midway.