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Esta página no está disponible en español. THE MIAMI HERALDArtists Take A Shot At ConsumerismBY ELISA TURNER
December 24, 2002 Artists in Deluxe Miami at Casas Reigner Gallery attack a culture of extreme consumerism, but one wonders if these artists doth protest too much. Thanks to consumer-driven examples set by the likes of Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and others, the group represented in Deluxe Miami isn't saying anything new when expensive sneaker designs are recycled into slick artworks announcing ''we are what we buy.'' Some artists seem not only repelled by, but also attracted to our purchases. Irony thinly coats Chus García-Fraile's oil paintings of sneaker soles, rippling with colorful treads radiant as neon lighting. The extravagant prices of Nike sneakers produced in Third World factories have been pilloried before, and the shoes themselves have become a one-size-fits-all marker of globalization, especially in art by José Antonio Hernández-Diez.. But García-Fraile, who like a number of artists in Deluxe Miami works in Spain, practically exults in the absurdly lavish charm of sneaker soles. She elevates them into precious fetishes, lessening their irony. It's not at all surprising to learn she's also produced work that blends the intersecting C's of the Chanel logo with fragmented puzzle-shapes of brilliant color lifted from stained glass windows. Or that she's also created enamel-on-wood paintings of hubcaps rendered with the shiny exactitude of 1920s American Precisionist paintings, which found Cubist intricacy and epic grandeur in smoke-churning factories. García-Fraile's view of rampant industrialism differs sharply from earlier artists, who found a kind of epic grandeur in the machine. Instead, she finds a perverse sexuality shot through it. OOPS Irony suffers from its own rampant excess in Love Real by Madrid artist Antonio de la Rosa. This is a vacuous video with a title offering wordplay on the brand name L'Oreal. With shaggy locks and pot belly, the artist appears in his video posing like a supermodel wannabe or drag queen having a bad hair day. As an overblown critique of a shock-loving, narcissistic culture, the video desperately tries to go over the top when the artist gets splattered by semen, but the over-done effort simply falls flat. A large installation by Carlos Blanco of Bogotá, Colombia deviates from easy slams of the shop-till-you-drop syndrome, and looks to immigrants leaving their homelands in search of a better life. His The Pilgrims II presents large photographs of a mother, father and elementary-school age son encased inside a huge, inflatable plastic bottle, perhaps a metaphor for a fragile economy. Nearly equal amounts of anxiety and boredom are etched in their faces; their body language is defensive and vulnerable. DIFFERENT MESSAGE They stand out as a message in a cheap bottle made for recycling. This is a message of gritty uncertainty, bereft of any storied romance clinging to typical ideas about messages in bottles, and plugged into a noisy machine suggesting the mechanical trappings of life-support. Dangerous machines by Arnaldo Morales, born in Puerto Rico and currently in New York, are pieces stylishly cobbled together with nasty glee from found mechanical parts. They are among the most interesting here. One whips a stiletto-sharp antenna back and forth, like a sex toy ratcheted out of control, or a parody of an excessively efficient Sharper Image product. A mural in black vinyl on Plexiglas by Miami-based artist Odalis Valdivieso installed in the gallery's Project Room isn't part of the exhibit, but fits the show's theme of commercial excess. Valdivieso creates digital drawings based on her photographs of cars piled in junkyards. The drawings are then translated into a crazy-quilt web of vinyl strips. Her results briefly recall Pop artist Tom Wesselman's tasteful black laser-cut metal drawings of nudes and interiors, but Valdivieso uncovers more interesting scenery of slip-sliding chaos. IF YOU GO "Deluxe Miami" and "Project Room: Odalis Valdivieso" are at Casas Reigner Gallery, 21 NE 39th St., Miami through Jan. 4. Hours are 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. Tue-Fri; noon-4 p.m. Sat; 305-573-8242.
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