THE S /SELECTED FILES
John Angeline
“ArtNexus”
New York City, New York
November 2000

El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY

The first work that one encounters at el Musec del Barrio sets the tone perfectly for this year’s “S-Files” exhibition. Georges Le Chevallier’s Drawing for Public Program, 2000 is executed on the front door of the museum. At once abstract and figurative, decorative and conceptual, playful and provocative, this giant striped question mark captures the extremes of the exhibition. For this year, while the curators Deborah Cullen and Yasmin Ramírez have maintained the same need for conceptual rigor that they have demonstrated in the past, there is a pluralistic, “up for grabs” quality to the exhibition that is refreshing and engaging. We see in this show a broad range of media, materials and issues, and a willingness to allow aesthetic pleasure to exist in its own right. While questions of identity, politics, and globalization still manifest themselves, it is without the heavy-handed didacticism and predetermined rhetorical stances that have occasionally marred exhibitions by artists being grouped together by such points of commonality as ethnic identity or geographic proximity. In fact, Le Chevallier, a “Latino” artist born in France - the former epicenter of European modern ism - himself represents the more open-ended nature of this show.

The works inside range from video and photography to mixed-media installations, sewn-fabric pieces, and traditional painting. In most cases the level of formal sophistication matches the intellectual complexity of the works. The strong presence of painting is especially welcome and interesting. Artists like Jaime Arredondo, Paul Henry Ram irez, and Vargas-Suarez Universal all present works that might initially appear to deal solely with a renewed interest in abstract form, but each artist layers his work with deeper meaning. Ramirez, for example,. makes exquisite compositions of geometric abstractions offset by flowing calligraphic lines and feathery curlicues; works so conventionally “pretty” that he almost challenges the viewer to dismiss them. However, by appropriating both geometric and biomorphic abstract passages, he offers up an irresistible visual complexity. Arredondo’s lush painterly floral forms evoke sacred symbolism in Mesoamerican culture. Vargas-Suarez Universal has executed another wall-scale work whose appearance may at first appear to be inscrutable but is in fact based on a piece by Rafael Montanez-Ortiz, who was the founding director of el Musec del Barrio.

Many works addressed questions of spirituality conjoined with sexuality, using a palimpsest of superimposed images to evoke encoded but conflicting responses. Scherezade’s Endless Love series features scenes of angels and genitalia set on a bright pink life vest and Domingo Nuno’s pieces from the series Veo Que Cosa No Es el Color de Rosa share these qualities, playing sex-working or objectified women against clichèd scenes of happy tropical living.

There was a strong showing by artists using traditional forms of handicraft in their works, particularly sewing. While one could think of these works as occupying both the territories of folk indigenous art and gendered/women’s work, the techniques were as varied as the results they yielded. Rabindranat’s Basic Male Role: Elephantitis plays with feminine forms of craft stitching, fabric patterning, paper machè- to create an abstracted evocation of phallocentrism. On the other hand, H.A. RodriguezMora and Lucia Warck-Meister made works of bold presence and delicate fragility, using the labor of their practice as a point of departure for meditating upon other matters.

In general, this year’s “S-Files” managed to strike a meaningful balance between the political and the formal, between concept and craft. The resulted provided a real sense of connectedness within a larger plurality, which, when one thinks about it, must be the most accurate way to describe the (any?) latino art community today. It is almost amusing to see how almost apologetic the curators seem to be over the lack of an overriding agenda, as well as the fact that many of these “new” artists have been getting exposure throughout New York recently-to me, both are things to celebrate. Although one might question the curators’ need to offer up such an unnecessarily weighted and convoluted construct as “post-post modernism” to account for the diverse spectacle that is this exhibition, the fact remains that the “S-Files,” along with such recent shows as “Greater New York” at P51 and the Whitney Biennial, has given us hope that a new group of artists has learned to relax a little and focus on the art of making art..