Omar Rodríguez & Vincent Valdez: Recent Paintings and Selected Prints Nov. 7 - Dec. 19, 2008

Vincent Valdez Born: 1977

Biography
Vincent Valdez was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas and is the youngest artist whose works are in the Chicano Collection exhibition. His first artistic influences came from the canvases of his late great-grandfather, an artist from Spain. Valdez began drawing at age three; as early as kindergarten, he realized his artistic abilities differed from others. While participating in a mural project at San Antonio's Esperanza Peace and Justice Center at age 10, Valdez decided art would be his career. He worked with his mentor, artist/muralist Alex Rubio, on murals around the Alamo City, eventually painting on his own. Upon graduating from Burbank High School, Valdez received a full scholarship to the International Fine Arts College in Miami, Florida. After one year, he accepted a full scholarship and transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, where he completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in illustration. He has had one-person shows at the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, the San Antonio Art League Museum, and the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas. He is represented by Finesilver Gallery, also in San Antonio. He has also exhibited his work at Parsons University, Paris; the Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Smithsonian; and the Mexican Museum in Chicago. His work is included in the collection of Cheech Marin, and is part of the traveling exhibition Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge. Valdez exhibits and works on commissioned pieces and teaches art to middle school students in San Antonio.

Statement
A menacing mood permeates the form and content of my most recent work. As in the past, I am dealing with expressions that intertwine traditions and stereotypes with themes that are familiar to my generation. In developing these works, however, I came to see the figures not only as forms frozen in time but also as captives of a universal culture of sex and violence. Through the use of a foreboding palette of dark hues and dim light, I have tried to vest the figures with a keen self-awareness that is both evocative and erotic. In their gaze, one can read both a sexual longing and an explosive hedonism. By portraying forms with expressive and at times exaggerated gestures, I hope to reflect characters on the brink of an overwhelming sexuality or violence while offering a hint of the hidden pathos of everyday life.




Omar Rodríguez
"cañada #1"
4' x 5'
Acrylic on canvas
2008


Born in San Juan, Texas, El Valle, in 1958, Rodríguez, a corporate and military nomad has lived and traveled extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, Mexico, and Latin America. His mom, a Pentecostal minister, and, dad, a career Air Force veteran.

Rodríguez returned to his South Texas roots in 1989. Rodríguez has no formal art training. He has been painting since 2001. Rodríguez works are reflections of his journey on earth, mortality, peace, spiritual beliefs, joys and sorrows. His heart and soul are exposed for all to see. Rodríguez’s technique is the frenetic random use of color while scraping his paint onto canvas with forks, knives, branches, digits, rocks and many other objects to create his images. He is constantly searching for what is beyond the superficial and approaches every piece as if it were his last. Beyond that, no eloquent artist’s statements nor esoteric explanations will be given.

Rodríguez is collected internationally, with his works in private, corporate, and academic collections. Rodríguez work was featured in Naomi Shihab Nye’s Is This Forever or What? showcasing selected Texas artists and poets. His portraiture work was shown in the 2006 Ford and Smithsonian exhibition of Retratos: 2000 Years of Latin American Portrait at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Seven of Rodríguez large scale abstracts are part of the University of Texas System permanent collection.

During the day, Rodríguez, a former senior executive at a Fortune 500 company, provides health care consultative services to businesses. In the desperation of the night, he paints. Rodríguez is married to legendary fashion designer Verónica Prida and father to sons, Jacob and Octavio(+). He and Verónica split their time between San Antonio, Plano, and Huatulco, Oaxaca.




"the welcoming #1"
45' x 72"
Acrylic on canvas
2008

El Realismo Mágico (The Magic Realism)

Other posts and work shops.

Screen Printing Workshop at the Art House Nov. 15th

Art In Progress
---by Tom O'Meara

The tranquillity of a large airy warehouse, where classical music plays softly in the background, and painters and trainees glide around pieces in progress, masks an intense force at work within. This is the studio of Sergio Hernandez, prolific artist and currently one of Oaxaca's most successful painters.

Virtually each year since 1980, he has produced or collaborated on an exhibition. He is in his studio at nine every morning and the earliest he leaves is eight at night. To relax, he runs in the morning, swims at his home in the evening and paints portraits outside of studio hours.

His appearance produces an illusory effect similar to his studio. What marks Hernandez out is his relaxed normality and lack of pretension. He possesses none of the affected quirks and marks of eccentricity we associate and expect from our artists. But when he opens his mouth the intensity is immediately apparent. Every conversation topic is related to his art.

He says he has always known, since he started painting as a child, that he would become an artist. It seemed like a natural progression. His parents, he explains, provided an artistic background, painting and working with wood.

He names Mexican painter Jose Guadeloupe Posada and German artists Enzo and Anfil Kafer as his major influences, but Oaxaca also provides him with a rich pool of inspiration. He cites the markets, attracted by the mythological backgrounds of the animals sold there. "I take them, paint them, transform them and place them in my art."

Like so many artists in Oaxaca he is inspired and influenced by the region's light, but also pays tribute to the colors of the Oaxacan earth and the Mixteca. Of Mixteca descent, Hernandez counts his ancestry as one of his major influences but doesn't think of himself as a specifically Mixteco artist or Mexican artist, simply, "a painter." This is not entirely true. Hernandez also works with ceramics and sculptures. In both mediums he is concerned with producing people and organic forms out of the shapes and textures of wood, plants and seeds.

His painting is a far more personal and biographical process. He draws on his own living experience and dreams, taking personal relationships between human beings, superimposing them on to animals and making mystical links.

"In producing art, the artist is breaking a mental state and is not passive but active."

Though personal experience is central to his art he is cagey about his love life. He professes that, "I don't believe in boyfriends and girlfriends." Instead he says that he finds people in the course of his life, meets them in the evening to paint them and then, "whatever happens after that nobody knows."

The body of work he is most pleased with is El Circo, which was exhibited in 1998. He describes it as, "my best reflection of everything living and what it is to watch it as a spectator." A fascination with the circus as metaphor is rooted in a tragic aspect of Hernandez's own life. His grandfather, who he never met, perished in a vat of burning
oil while fooling around drunk on the tightrope of a circus that visited his Oaxacan village. As a child Hernandez never saw a circus; his family was too traumatized by the experience and it became a taboo subject. El Circo is, in some form, a reaction to this.

For the last five years he has been in therapy, analyzing concepts such as love and how human relationships work in different ways. He entered therapy, he says, not because he personally needed it, but "because I needed some answers about relationships because of my professional work." His therapy was abruptly paused, however, as his analyst died a few weeks ago. Themes in his art have varied and developed, related to the countries where he has lived. Over the past two decades he has spent three months in Portugal, two years in Paris, two months in Florence and three months touring Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Turkey. Although Hernandez says he is religious, labeling himself as humanistic, it is not an explicit theme in his art. He describes both himself and his art as non-political. Hernandez believes that the primary responsibility of an artist is simply to "be creative" and though the artist possesses a responsibility to society, as does any human being, it does not extend beyond this. Hernandez reckons: "In producing art, the artist is breaking a mental state and is not passive but active." He says that as he has gotten older his art has grown "more refined, more sober and more free." "I'm working now on a series called Las Escaleras where you're going up and down in concentric circles and it's like a maze that finally reaches love." Hernandez is referring to a wider and more esoteric notion of love. He says he has been preoccupied for a long time with the visual image of trying to get to another metaphysical level and has found inspiration in Asian culture. Influenced by reading about the East and, in particular, India, he says that whereas with the west the "state of consciousness stops at a certain level," in the oriental tradition it progresses to another plain and beyond.

Hernandez reckons: "In producing art, the artist is breaking a mental state and is not passive but active." He says that as he has gotten older his art has grown "more refined, more sober and more free."

"I'm working now on a series called Las Escaleras where you're going up and down in concentric circles and it's like a maze that finally reaches love." Hernandez is referring to a wider and more esoteric notion of love. He says he has been preoccupied for a long time with the visual image of trying to get to another metaphysical level and has found inspiration in Asian culture. Influenced by reading about the East and, in particular, India, he says that whereas with the west the "state of consciousness stops at a certain level," in the oriental tradition it progresses to another plain and beyond.

Hernandez's painting style has been criticized as too reminiscent of Oaxaca's most famous artist, Francisco Toledo, and his skeleton images classified as Toledo rip-offs. To these accusations he simply replies: "I don't care." If he likes an influence he says he uses it no matter where it originates, and counters that the skeletons are heavily inspired by Posada rather than Toledo. He adds that he is influenced by Toledo but more in terms of certain painting techniques and types of paint he uses than any thematic material.

To critics of Oaxaca's art scene, who believe that it has seen its golden age and has now grown too stale and derivative, he replies: "I don't believe that it has reached its highest point."

He admits that Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo signified something very important for Oaxacan art. But: "In reality I believe that the current situation has something to do with the galleries." He figures that the galleries in Oaxaca, by dictating what is displayed in Oaxaca on grounds of marketing and sales, have stifled development, and created the public perception of a specific, stagnant art scene.

As evidence of fresh ideas that do not receive requisite recognition he cites some young Oaxacan artists who are trying to do something different with installations. Hernandez is not the first to bemoan the lack of support Oaxaca's galleries provide to young artists.

However, he thinks the wider Mexican art world is in good health. His own future? He is planning to visit India for a month in September and then live in Madrid for two years. He'd also like to become more involved with cinema and use film as a medium. He has already made two short films, though they are yet to be edited. One is set in Chinatown in Havana, Cuba, and the other is about people in Marrakesh, Morocco, and what they hide.

And what does he believe he would have done if he hadn't become an artist? Hernandez pauses and laughs. "I don't know. Nothing good, I know that."