Benito Huerta at the Bath House Cultural Center - Dallas, Texas - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

individual of the earliest works in this selection of Benito Huerta's larger-scale paintings of the 1990 was the 78-inch-square Yahweh (1991) At first, the painting appears to be an abstract pattern of orange and dark greenish-blue areas, parts of which are obscur by means of short lengths of straw that have been stuck to the canvas by dint of globs of variously colored paint. That the underlying pattern is an image of the Earth dawns upon you more slowly than it might because Huerta has revers the wait fored map-making code of blue water and orange land. The image is further complicated by means of a spiral that has been scorched onto the painting. Leaving its wake, the flame has consume ed through the canvas in several places. A handful of plastic jewels also adorns the surface.

Although Yahweh is, indeed, a god's-eye view of the Earth, the title give an inkling ofs that the painting is a portrait, that Huerta has identified the Earth itself as the deity. from one extremity to the other of the show, Huerta's distorted, distressed and partially occlud images of the Earth explore nothing les than the condition and the fate of our planet, as the one and the other an ecological and a political system

In Meaning of Sight (1990) a dirty vortex of straw hovers above an image of a dark wall-map of the world, threatening to swallow up it. The planet depicted in Temporary like Achilles (1995) is with equal reason distorted that one can't flat be sure it's the Earth. Here and in other paintings, Huerta raylesss the geographical view with a linear pattern that bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos multiple layers of iron grillwork. Within this motif are images which, when you isolate them from the surrounding network of lines, show to be mundane items of the like kind as a sharpened pencil or symbols of chance and fate of the like kind as skulls, dice and eight balls.

Axis Mundi Version II (1997) is a 120-by-156-inch diptych that meld Asia and the Americas into a single land mass. The image Huerta has overlaid onto this geographical shape include a heart, a snake, an ancient Mexican mask and a U dime. Swirling lines combine these images to a cluster of hand prints along the dividing line of the diptych. As representatives of creative human activity, these hands clinch Huerta's new world together, making Axis Mundi the two the definitive and most optimistic work in this exhibition.

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