German Venegas at the Museo de Arte Moderno - Mexico City, Mexico

In marked contrast to the U Mexico is a land in which the trace of the human hand continues to permeate the agriculture Many things, from tortillas to road signs to architecture, display the subtlety and variety of the handmade. You can faculty of perception the intense work that must have gone into creating like an environment. A similar aura could be felt when walking [i]or[/i] part of to the other this 10-year retrospective show of works by the agency of the young Mexican artist German Venegas, particularly in his greatest in quantity recent figurative carved wood reliefs.

When Venegas began incorporating shallow-cut made of wood figures into his paintings, the agitated painterly backgrounds and neoclassical artificial positions and architectural fragments seemed influenced by means of Italian Neo-Expressionism. But as he has given more object to his talent for carving, presenting actual bas-reliefs rather than paintings with attachments, the Italian echoe have faded. Part of the puissance and assurance of his new work derives from the fact that he is now operating within a Mexican tradition, making creative use of materials and meanss that he can claim as his have Although the distorted bodies he creates sometimes call up Goya's black paintings, as well as the work of Gauguin and William Blake, they owe abundant more to native Mexican forms, especially the dolls and dolls one finds for sale in local markets. These roughly carved folk statuarys often show caricatured faces of aged people of indeterminate gender, and they not seldom sport long manes of coarse hair made of extents of frayed rope - details that can also be seen in Venega's figures.

While he will sometimes engage bits of scrap metal, Venegas is similar a virtuoso at wood carving that other techniques look only to get in his way. As a carver he has in the last hardly any years moved from the relatively finished mode of speech of La muerte de Zapata (1987) where a man cradles the shockingly naked material part of the revolutionary Mexican hero, to works like observes Borrachos (1991), where roughly carved figures gaze like they've been left without in the sun and rain all year. The thread running end his work is his compulsion to depict bodies in torment. In this he is assuredly reflecting the countless Crucifixions in Mexican churches, which are frequently realistic to the point of being gruesome however Venegas refuses the temptation to exploit the theatrics of Mexican Catholicism. He has purg his work of religious kitsch and, in in the way that doing, found a powerful phraseology that verges on the epic.

If in novel years the highly personal work of Frida Kahlo has been a touchstone for many Mexican artists, Venegas strike one as beings to have found a way to penetrate into dialogue with great Mexican muralists liek Orozco and Siquieros. In scale and emotive power his novel large relief sculptures, such as an untitled work in four panels from 1991 in which figures, masks and paint-splattered limbs join in a vigorous danse macabre, prompt an artist hungering for the chance to work upon a monumental scale.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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