Art: Carolyn Castaño: Art after the post-Chicano movement

Ms. Castaño spoke to WPW, my women painters' group, last week at luncheon.  She has an impressive art education, SFAI and UCLA. 

Her materials are mixed - gouache, acrylics, 
watercolor, painted on large pieces of watercolor paper, usually affixed to the wall without frames. There are also light boxes, which make use of the appearance of images on media screens - the high contrast, over-saturated, crisply-defined lines, the flattened perspective.

Her seemingly bright and simple palette displays well on these, but I suspect,also commands the viewing space. Large drawings in the Southwest Airlines terminal at LAX are bold, absolutely distracting from the chaos of baggage claim.  They announce so vividly:  you are here, in Los Angeles, a very singular world.   

She's rooted in a Latina-feminist perspective, though her imagery appears very contemporary.  It's narrative, historical, and figurative, driven by a kind of funereal iconography, deaths-head molds and portraits made of ancestors and cherished, images of lost souls, their faces whitened, impurities of skin and bone disappeared in their now-eternal slumber. 

The Narco-femmes series is insightful and saddening - the objectification and obliteration of the female, of the possibility of real human development based on family, nurture, and slow deep growth sacrificed for the ultimate commodity experience - the drug high. I think of Millais' "Ophelia".

I see confident, bold line shaping forms with faux-primitive colors, thinking of Fauvism, composition drawn from the Pattern and Decoration Movement, Central American textiles, and outsider folk artists (le Douanier Rousseau's Garden of Eden work).  I also think of late Hockney's drawings on the iPad of California palm trees, and Hockney's early fine portrait drawings. Matisse's late collages from "Jazz" seem another reference.

There's a smoothly-integrated synthesis that's referential to art history, and yields a body of purposeful, thoughtful work offering a perspective to those attendant at the shifting plates of cultural diversity, at the "babe struggling to be born", second generation.