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ARTURO HERRERA.


Arturo Herrera's cryptic work coaxes us deep into psychological woods, where, like the children in the fairy tales that inspire him, we're forced to rely on instinct and imagination to find our way. In the wall painting, photographs, works on paper, sculpture, and reliefs recently on view, what was concealed or absent bore as much weight as what was visible, leaving the viewer to complete the picture with his or her own resources.

Many of the twenty-three collages collage (kəläzh`, kō–) [Fr.,=pasting], technique in art consisting of cutting and pasting natural or manufactured materials to a painted or unpainted surface—hence, a work of art in this medium. on view (all works 2000) demonstrated Herrera's penchant for cartoons, coloring books, and other childhood sources; one piece included intersecting violet lines attributable to the hero in the children's classic Harold and the Purple Crayon. Herrera's work attempts to rekindle a childlike state of mind in adults: to awaken the facility not just for conjuring something from nothing (like Harold) but also for giving in to the passions and perversions
1. deviation from the normal course.
2. sexual perversion; see under deviation.


per·ver·sion (pr-vûrzh
 we learn to repress as we mature. In the background of another collage--a page swiped from a picture book--cutesy animal eyes peer through knotholes in a wooden fence, staring at a levitating, looping brown line (the artist's addition). A really long, floating turd TURD - Timed Universal Rearward Destroyer? Surely I'm not the only adult to engage in such childish speculation. In a discernible shift from Herrera's earlier collages, which incorporated mutated but identifiable fragments from Disney characters and folklore figures, many of the works here reduced the juvenilia to pure abstraction. In one, a gritty, dark mass of watercolor overlapping a wash of pale gray seemed to evoke the basic struggle between good and evil. In some cases, the seeking-shapes-in-the-clouds approach seemed unjustified, as in a watercolor comprising stacked horizontal brushstrokes-elegantly yet eccentrically minimalist.

Despite its showy scale and barrage of kiddie colors, the five-by-seven-foot collage Stay was the least compelling piece in the exhibition. It seemed schematic and formulaic: Reduce carroonish shapes into flat, saturated elements; pulverize and layer into an impressively jumbled composition. Much better was AllIAsk, a cinematic, phantasmagoric rendering in pencil of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs IBM's early competitors in the mainframe business: Burroughs, CDC, GE, Honeywell, NCR, RCA and Univac. as a riot of rubbery body parts. Near the right edge of the piece, reinforcing the sense of spectacle, a tassel hinted that the curtain on this show could be brought down at any time. Somewhere in between--compelling, yes; accessible, not exactly--were At Your Side, a large-scale felt wall work, and Hurry Home, Blue, a cardboard sculpture painted serene blue. The former hung low, literally at one's side, with the barest horizon line and an allover riot of "scribblings," precision-cut from black felt, suggesting a landscape (a forest or swamp) or, harking back to Abstract Expressionism expressionism, term used to describe works of art and literature in which the representation of reality is distorted to communicate an inner vision. The expressionist transforms nature rather than imitates it.

In Art



In painting and the graphic arts, certain movements such as the Brücke (1905), Blaue Reiter (1911), and new objectivity (1920s) are described as expressionist.
, orchestrated chaos. Lying nea rby on the floor, Hurry Home, Blue was basically a line constructed in three dimensions, as if to indicate a path, albeit a directionless one: Which way is home?

Fraught with niggling riddles, coyly tucked-away mysteries, and sly, silent enigmas, Herrera's work refuses to yield any easy interpretations or answers. Indeed, if there is an answer, it's buried in the viewer's mind, not that of the artist--packed away with a lot of other deep-seated psychological muck.
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Title Annotation:art exhibition
Author:Caniglia, Julie
Publication:Artforum International
Article Type:Brief Article
Geographic Code:1USA
Date:Jan 1, 2001
Words:511
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