‘Controversy’ takes familiar subjects in new directions

ARTURO SANDOVAL’S ‘STRAIGHT JACKET’

What is “Controversy”? What’s controversial? Depends. Ray Vasquez, mild-mannered gallery manager, etc., etc., thought telling someone else might be too, well—you know. And because someone else was happy to decide, that was it.

“We just left that to the hands of the artists,” Vasquez says while leading a tour of “Controversy” at Gallery Azul, in a real-life loft in downtown San Pedro (real freight elevator). “It was more about what artists feel is controversial right now.”

And can’t you guess what that is? C’mon—it’s an election year.

Gerry Chow gives you what you want with The Good The Bad & The Swindler, a triptych painted in a style that’s somewhere between Barry McGee and Shepard Fairey—only flatter. Real, real flat. The swindler, spelled “$windler” in the piece, is Bush-ie—a young Texas Air National Guard-era Bush, maybe: eyebrows dark and face chubby.

The bad is naturally Osama, the most two-dimensional of the three, and the good is the Dalai Lama—almost unrecognizable in a rear three-quarter head view that shows us his wire-rimmed glasses in all their utilitarian ecstasy. Maybe that’s the point. Vasquez says at one point that he’s amazed how many people don’t know stuff—like what the Dalai Lama looks like.

“I teach,” the high school teacher says. “And they don’t know we’re in a war, we’re in a recession. They’re just texting.” (And what does it say that we recognize bad so much faster than good? Is George W. Bush this unrecognizable to Tibetans? Doubt it.)

The bad continues. Abstract painter Arturo Sandoval—the subject of Gallery Azul’s very next show—delivers a less-than-terrifying, though bloody vivid Descuartizado (Dismembered). It’s somehow very composed, even though there’s bone and bloody limbs—and, though it’s not immediately apparent, this is a painting of a soldier.

The flip side is Tim Sigafoos’ Average Joe, Marine and Government, a painting of a soldier by a soldier. That’s right: Sigafoos recently finished his tour, Vasquez says. “He’s actually pro-war, ’cause he went through it and he had a positive experience.”

Really? There’s two ways to see Average Joe: as standard-issue dogface (the soldier here is in fatigues, rifle at the ready)—and as a stranger in a strange land. One reason this painting jumps off the white wall at you is the chorus of orange, ghostly faces surrounding the unknown soldier. Could he be Sigafoos? Good question.

Wish I could tell you this show gets easier—but even when it looks like it is, it doesn’t. Hector Silva delivers a series of giclées resembling delicate charcoal drawings, each with its own little twist. Silva is possibly better-known for his G.I. Jose, a depth-of-field drawing of soldiers on a battlefield, their heads all calaveras. But Six Dollar Bag of Terror is even more compelling for its apparent normality.

A portrait of a Latino immigrant selling bags and boxes of fruit on the roadside, it seems to be a straightforward poke at how we came to scrutinize the immigrant population wholesale, after 9/11. Then, of course, you see that the fruit seller has a grenade mixed in with some of that fruit—and explosives strapped to his torso, under a button-up shirt. And you have to look at the whole piece all over again.

There’s actually two works here that aren’t bone-chilling, both by Michelle Juarez, who signs her work “Pinche Michi.” Her gorgeous Nuestra Madre’s Milk, a beatific mother-suckling-a-child portrait, is rendered in positively heavenly colors. The only controversy is whether something this luminous can really be a giclée print. Turns out, it can.

CONTROVERSY GALLERY AZUL | 520 W FIFTH ST | SECOND FLOOR | SAN PEDRO 90731 | 310.831.2116 | OPEN BY APPOINTMENT AND 5:30-10PM DURING FIRST THURSDAYS ART WALK | CLOSING RECEPTION SUN 11-4PM | THROUGH AUG 31

Tags: art, contoversy, gallery azul, San Pedro