A Baroque Populism - Luis Jimenez

Art in America, March, 1999 by Charles Dee Mitchell

The vibrantly colored, controversy-provoking sculptures of Luis Jimenez celebrate working-class culture and history, especially that of Mexican Americans. A traveling survey of his work is currently in Houston.

Luis Jimenez's 1989 polychrome sculpture Border Crossing (Cruzando El Rio Bravo) is dedicated to the artist's father, who, along with Jimenez's grandmother, entered the U.S. illegally from Mexico in 1924.(1) Made from urethane-coated fiberglass, the 10-foot-high, totem-polelike sculpture depicts three figures--a man, a woman and an infant--who flow into one another almost as though the fiberglass were still in a semi-liquid state. Standing barefoot, with his pants rolled up to his calves, the man carries the woman on his shoulders. The crying baby struggles out from under the woman's shawl. Jimenez renders the figures more dramatic by painting shadows along the heavily corded muscles on the man's arms and between the lines on both figures' faces. The reds and blues that dominate their clothing tend toward a purplish range which, together with the glossy highlights, helps evoke a moonlit river crossing. As is often the case with Jimenez's sculpture, the faces of the figures seem older than their bodies--testifying to a life of struggle. In fact, Border Crossing is a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans who have made the clandestine journey north, and the expressions on the faces of the figures speak of fear, determination and hope. Knowing the history behind the dedication, it is tempting to view the baby as a self-portrait, but actually Jimenez was born on this side of the border, in El Paso, Texas, in 1941.

Jimenez, who has been known to open 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 often favors violent and kitschy imagery. These sculptures have struck some viewers as unnervingly stereotypical and devoid of moral uplift, but the artist sees his use of Chicano stereotypes as part of an effort to redeem aspects of Southwest American history that have either been ignored or erased by Anglo culture.

The first touring retrospective devoted to Jimenez is aptly titled "Working Class Heroes, Images from the Popular Culture." Along with eight monumental sculptures, the show, which is making its final stop at the University of Houston's Blaffer Gallery [Jan. 23-Mar. 28], presents over 60 maquettes and works on paper. (At the Dallas Museum of Art, where it debuted, there were several more sculptures and an installation that did not travel to other venues.) Seen in depth, Jimenez's work creates a world where raucousness and pathos hold equal sway, where pointed social commentary coexists with a feel for the heroic dimension of everyday lives. His figurative style is a distinctive blend of sinewy Baroque forms and cartoonlike, Pop energy.

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

Jimenez began using fiberglass when he was an art student at the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1960s. The material seemed as "unavoidable" to him as he felt steel, with its connotations of industry and modernity, must have been for David Smith and Alexander Calder when they started out. A component in many commercial products, fiberglass was also used for customized cars and decorations in amusement parks. Its popular appeal rested in large part on the flawless finish it could acquire in expert hands, a quality which was then largely abhorred as a element in the fine arts. This prejudice was challenged when Jimenez and others started to work with fiberglass in the 1960s. In Los Angeles, Craig Kaufmann emphasized, even exaggerated the slick commercial quality of fiberglass in abstract sculptures that gave birth to the term "finish fetish." Bruce Nauman, in his early work, preferred fiberglass in its funkier, unfinished state where it more closely resembled human skin. Kaufmann and Nauman may have represented polar opposites in their approaches to the material, but both were concerned with taking fiberglass away from its established commercial uses, and thereby transforming it unmistakably into art. Jimenez proceeded differently, developing a figurative style that enthusiastically adopted techniques used in making airplane fuselages, racing car bodies or figures for the midway.