Carmen Lomas Garza at San Jose Museum of Art - San Jose - Brief Article - Critical Essay

A 1991 painting titled Heaven and Hell is a vivid key to understanding the thematic concerns that underlie nearly all of the oils and gouaches presented in Carmen Lomas Garza's 25-year retrospective exhibition. Composed as a horizontally divided diptych, the oil depicts a brightly illuminated world of dancing, feasting and celebration suspended over a hellish underworld with scenes of torture, humiliation and toil. The innocuous-looking tunnel that connects these realms reminds us that neither is so far away from the other as might be hoped or expected. The simultaneous presence of overt joy and hidden dread haunts Garza's other works, which record the daily life of Mexican Americans in South Texas, where Garza spent her childhood in the 1950s.

Mixing fond memories with a profusion of precise pictorial details, Garza brings a shrewd novelist's eye to the task of visual narrative. In one of the larger oil paintings, El Milagro (The Miracle), 1987, we see a pair of boastful ranch hands who proudly display a clutch of rattlesnakes they've killed in a nearby field, obviously relishing the rapt admiration of onlooking children even as they arrogantly ignore the disapproval of the parents. These returning hunters are portrayed with a subtle mix of affection and condescension, which invites the viewer to enjoy the heroics while sharing parental concern about such dangerous role models for impressionable children. Rather more bemused in its representation of innocent folly is a smaller oil painting titled Una Tarde (The Afternoon), 1990, in which a preteen Juliet flirts with a would-be Romeo hiding outside her bedroom window. Her smiling grandmother pretends to be too preoccupied with knitting to properly squelch the early bloom of sexual fascination.

Garza's style, at once knowing and naive, seems to draw from many sources. Most of her figures are rendered with a crisp, flat economy that is reminiscent of the Hispanic retablo and ex-voto traditions, while the surrounding architecture and foliage often sport an astounding amount of lovingly applied detail. Color generally is presented in its most optimistically sunny guise, foregrounding the work's affirmative character even as it animates the salient moments of anxiety.

["Carmen Lomas Garza: A Retrospective" was curated by Patricia Hickson. Itinerary: South Texas Institute for the Arts in Corpus Christi (Sept. 15-Dec. 9, 2001); the Ellen Noel Art Museum in Odessa, Tex. (Jan. 1-Apr. 14, 2002); the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, N.M. (Apr. 27-July 28); and the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, Fla. (Nov. 1-Jan. 12, 2003).]

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