Freewheeling with painter Robert Maldonado

ROBERT MALDONADO’S “PUBLIC MASK”

I like artists before they’ve been hit with wealth and taste, before they’re, like Joni Mitchell, used to that clean white linen and fancy French cologne. I like artists when they’re maybe kind of silly, and everything, for them, is the shock of the new. This is especially true of my feelings for university feminist painters, for whom everything is a tender vulva, but it’s true of my feelings for Robert Maldonado, too.

Born in 1984 and hanging his very first solo show (at San Pedro’s lovely Gallery Azul), Maldonado runs to gritty ’70s vanscapes, all acrylic and jagged aerosol. There’s a lowrider vibe that makes me happy, takes me back to when I was six and Maldonado was negative, and East LA was getting its due at least in the movies of Cheech & Chong.

One of his paintings, Motionless, is the profile of a bearded old man, his hair flying behind him like Victory at the prow of a ship, and seemingly sprouting wings from his temples. That old man is my muse, endlessly seeking enlightenment at truck stops through greater Nevada, except he sort of seems like he would kidnap teenage Mormon girls from their bedrooms as well. He is creepy and craggy and beautiful. He is a Patrick Swayze song of freedom.

And he is maybe very wise from eating all those shrooms.

Maldonado presents a sweet mixture of Braques hands and melty Daliscapes but mostly damaged, lo-fi figures superimposed with splotches and smears. Vicinity of Beauty looks like Scarlett Johansson (as Girl With Pearl Earring) but with a Martian (or “Beauty School Dropout,” or Barbarella) cone bouffant. Adorning her canvas are some maple or artichoke shapes (Maldonado’s freeform shapes can be hard to decipher) and around the corners are some blocks of pure color, like pixellated digital fragments that have become corrupted. It’s all fragmented, these shapes invading the frame. He isn’t looking at a static scene with a lady, but a lady surrounded by energy and swirling matter. The universe is alive.

The only work that really betrays Maldonado’s tender age is his triptych Santana/Gilmour/Hendrix, which Gallery Azul has hung in an out-of-the-way nook. There’s a fine slashing energy surrounding their heads (Hendrix’s, in particular, gives off serpentine Japanesey dragon vibes, while the others evoke the sparks from Tesla coils), but the subject matter itself, though finely painted, is a bit too swap-meet-Jim Morrison to take seriously, unless your parents gave you serious cash for your dorm room decor.

Then there are the dark canvases I like best: There’s The Florist, some sort of monstrous man vomiting forth beautiful tendrils of plants. There’s Internal Shroud, a beautiful, strong Cubist Frankenstein hand near a man’s wee pud; his other arm is outstretched, drawing a line straight to his ventricles, unattached to the rest of his body. There are small inset geologic scapes under blue skies, and electricity or his aura jumps around him. There’s something with a whore boot and a nippleless tit bending over a hand with a heart and a hypodermic needle piercing both.

And there is Rush, which you just know Maldonado thinks is about creativity—the funnel cloud escaping from a hole in the head. What our artist probably missed in his own canvas (they always do) is the Terminator robotics of the man, the burned-out eye sockets, the way creativity has destroyed what could have been a nice little Stepford kid. Pity, that. Life could have been so easy. But in any case, you can always get in your van and ride, like the wind, to be free again.

ROBERT MALDONADO: ECHOES GALLERY AZUL | 520 W EIGHTH ST | SECOND FLOOR | SAN PEDRO 90731 | 310.831.2116 | RECEPTION THURS 5-10PM DURING FIRST THURSDAY SAN PEDRO ARTWALK | OPEN BY APPT

Tags: art, gallery azul, hendrix, morrison, painting, robert maldonado, San Pedro