‘Beauties & Beasts’ makes its meanings transparent

‘NO ME QUIERE’ by MIRIAM MARTINEZ

“Beauties & Beasts” at Picture This Gallery is a small show physically, but its anime-eyed pin-ups, doe-eyed bulls and lusty women can’t be subdued. Nor can the lard. Many of the “Beauties” here come from Shannon Jones—and Jones hails from Northern California’s Manteca, which used to want to be someplace else.

“The name of the town was something else,” says gallery owner Mattie Gomez, “but Shannon says the railroad misspelled it on their tickets. It would have cost more to reprint the tickets than to change the name of the town, so they left it.”

True story: It was originally Cowell Station, then Monteca, until some itinerant printer bought the wrong vowel and made it Manteca—which means lard in Spanish. Learning is fun here, unless you have something against . . . lard.

Artist Miriam Martinez continues your education with La Montatoros, a vivid painting of a rosy-cheeked, pigtailed cowgirl riding a bull—the literal meaning of montatoros. She’s very Pippi Longstocking, somehow—all animated, girlish smile and swinging hair. But Martinez also tells us about her painting’s inspiration and the other meaning of “montatoros”: a girl who sleeps around—and after that, her subject is . . . still adorable! Nobody doesn’t like pigtails.

The cuteness continues in Martinez’s Papalote, a little bird—a sparrow or a robin, maybe—flying a kite in an impossibly blue sky. (In Spanish, papalote means kite.) And where is the kite? Follow the string to find it—around the corner, on the very edge of the canvas. It’s a nice touch.

Martinez makes bulls equally cuddly by rendering them in blue paint, dancing with assorted ladies and being about as human as possible. Her Luchador makes calf-eyes at you through what looks like a wrestler’s mask, while her Quiereme Siempre, a lovelorn sparrow with a calavera (skull) head, is carefully rendered in a lover’s mental anguish, writhing over assorted lotería cards. Across the room, Jones’ damsels watch the animals—and a row of those ornate Day of the Dead sugar skulls that Jones has carefully updated with assorted automobiliana (one has a flying eyeball). For her women, Jones has gone the skate deck route, painting each on the bottom of a board no one should ever ride. And so you have the pirate girl, the cowgirl, even the geisha—and naturally most are posed a la Jessica Rabbit, with that one lurid eye peeping at you under a mane of hair, festooned with precision tattoos.

It looks familiar, but thankfully, Jones—who works at a Harley dealership—renews it somewhat, with car (or motorcycle) parts, and a series of interviews with tattooed people that reveal some of the real reasons we get tattooed—and live to regret it.

Tattoos of ex-wives, grayscale body art blown all out of proportion—her subjects (who have no connection to the skate decks on the wall) spill their guts to the artist. Jenn, 32, an office manager, tells how she and a group of friends each got the initials “L.B.” tattooed on themselves to represent Long Beach. Lita S., also an office manager, says her most painful work was the cupcakes she had tattooed on the insides of her forearms.

What does it all mean? What may we infer from the piston rings bisecting the beauty in Jones’ Pistons, Rings & Instructions, or the headlight rings surrounding the ladies in her 1960s-style Trim Rings?

Not everything here has a deeper meaning—which is exactly why people hate pop surrealism, but also its genius. You don’t have to be an artist to understand anything here—even Martinez’s works are in Spanish, some of which are not translated. They’re easy to follow, which isn’t always a bad thing. Not when it looks as fun as this show.

BEAUTIES & BEASTS PICTURE THIS GALLERY & CUSTOM FRAMING | 4130 NORSE WAY | LONG BEACH 90808 | 562.425.4861 | OPEN TUES-FRI 12-6PM SAT 10AM-4PM | THROUGH JULY 19

Tags: art, calaveras, Long Beach, picture this gallery, shannon jones