Alfredo Garcia Revuelta at Iturralde - Los Angeles - Brief Article - Critical Essay

A kind of Pop immediacy animates the allegorical sculptures and paintings of Alfredo Garcia Revuelta, which were seen in a lively survey of works from the `90s that marked the Spanish artist's West Coast debut. Although Garcia Revuelta's roots are in a kind of cartoon surrealism, his art goes beyond the randomness of dream imagery in developing odd, resonant metaphors. The life-size polychrome wood sculpture Mother and Child (1997-98), for example, depicts a woman in contemporary dress cradling an infant in her arms. The two gaze intensely into each other's eyes, while a blue laser light flickers within an eyeball-like plastic dome that is positioned where the mother's right breast should be. The mesmerizing power of motherhood is weirdly captured in that pulsing light.

Another polychrome figure, Man Building (1996), features a nude man with brick-patterned skin and a window positioned over his heart. Through the window can be seen a dollhouse-like living room, complete with a kidney-shaped coffee table and abstract paintings on the walls. The man stands at attention, head angled up, hands clenched at his sides, literally embodying the edifice of culture and the rigidity of man-made structures.

The blunt, literal nature of Garcia Revuelta's work provides its humor. Comic shifts in scale dramatize how we register experience through our own bodies. In the painting Woman Crying a River (1996), a nude woman's tears flow down her prone body to become a river in the pint-sized landscape around her. In The Pass of Time (1995), a polychromed wooden bust of a man is traversed by three toy-like metal tractors with attached rakes that are in the process of gouging wrinkles in his face. The man's upturned eyes and tilted head play off traditional saintly poses in Spanish religious sculpture. Here, the subject seems beyond otherworldly help, as worry lines are dug across his forehead, at the sides of his eyes and above his mouth.

Garcia Revuelta's painting The Painful One (1995) skewers cliched notions of Spanish romance as well as the sexually tinged masochism of sainthood. In this off-kilter melodrama--one that might have been conjured by Pedro Almodovar--a statuesque seated dona is caught in the act of piercing her exposed breast with tiny bullfighting swords, abetted by three putti in matador outfits that flutter overhead. When its comic-book directness is really working, Garcia Revuelta's art packs the emotional force of grand opera.

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