Carlos Almarez at LACMA

As part of PST/LA/LA, The Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art (LACMA) shows a survey of painting from the prolific and prodigiously gifted Carlos Almaraz, who died too young of AIDS in 1989. From 1973-83, Almaraz was part of a Chicano (though that term was new) Collective, called Los Four, which included Frank Romero, Gilbert Magu Lujan, and Roberto de la Rocha. They worked together, painted and sculpted many of the same images (cars, cacti, dogs, chairs, flames) as they developed a Chicano lexicon of imagery. They are all being recognized anew. Frank Romero just had an outstanding retrospective at MOLAA last spring and Gilbert Magu Lujan will have a huge retrospective (over 200 works) at UCI this fall. The fourth member, Roberto de la Rocha, unfortunately destroyed all his works, went into seclusion for 20 years and is just now rejoining the Los Angeles artistic community.  - from Nancy Kay Turner, blog on RIOT.

These artworks are glorious, lurid, joyful, riotous portrayals in which Almarez takes Los Angeles as a prism for his vision of life. They are fearless, brash, overwhelming, and yet poignant, expressing an appetite and a celebration of it that seems gargantuan.   

Growing City, 1988, pastel

 This is one of my favorites, a drawing that 
can instruct animators.  The action pulls at cross directions across the paper. As buildings sway to the right behind aqueducts that appear Roman, cars, a figure on horseback, and runners stream off the left corner, creating tension and stasis at once. In the sky, debris like large confetti flakes down. They swoop and glide like night spirits. I think of air raids, earthquakes, all lit with more neon-powered saturated color than the Vegas strip. It's a nightmare a Futurist painter could wish he'd thought of.  

School Days, 1988  

"School Days" is boxy, bursting with references - beloved Echo Park, the arched bridge, bunnies, student artwork, explosive abstract marks that suggest flames and explosions, faces.  The black background reminds us of chalkboards and velvet paintings, as electric vibrations rock the surface and a loose grid struggled to contain the turmoil.

Echo Park Bridge at Night, 1988

 I really can't think of another artist who has used color this ferociously. Yes, we can talk about the Fauves, Futurists, Van Gogh, Munch, Miro, Ensor, and should. They reverb like guitars in his work.  But the intensity!  This comes from molaas, Peruvian costumes, swirling Mexican dancing, and hallucinogenic visions described by peyote and acid users.

Echo Park, 4 panels

My, this is such a treasure to me.  I hope it's always on display, to carry in my heart and mind - what it means to live here, to be present to this singular city.  

detail, Panel 1

The Echo Park panels depict key life moments - in the first, a flower-covered car, reminding me of a hearse, is parked in front of a tomb-like dome.  In the second, a bride and groom stand  apart on the shore while the palms bleed into the lake, the reflections creating a lake of fire.   

Echo Park, second panel

Echo Park, third panel

Boats afloat on a small lake usually suggest serenity and calm.  Here they pass through and cross the flaming waters at risk of great harm, fragile, the form struggling to emerge from the frenzied brushstrokes. 

Sunset Crash, 1982

Of all his work, I admire the car crash series. This was the world before seatbelts, when over 50,000 people died every year in auto accidents, more than the entire number of the Vietnam War. Death by freeway is the eponymous Angeleno passage, freeway flyers who lose control in LALAand.

The palette, still vibrant and pulsing, is yet controlled, and the beauty of color,form, and composition have a formal feeling, as Emily Dickinson once wrote in her famous poem about death.   

detail, Crash

I am also fascinated and compelled by the deeply integral relation of narrative figuration and formal style.  They are inseparable, meant to be, breathtaking painterly unity accomplished with brio and confident balance.

Suburban Nightmare, 1983

This painting has a blocky unsatisfying neo-primitive quality, like a child's drawing, yet with that distinctive saturated color.  The emerald grass/hedge is so warm yet cold against the destructive power of the flames that consume the family home.  

Two other groups of paintings aren't discussed here, mostly because I haven't finished viewing the exhibit.  Several of them, mostly larger, are less satisfying to me, because of the use of thick tinted impasto shapes which clotted and interrupted image and composition.  It's not darkly muddy but chalky muddy. An impression of unresolved forms remains.

BIOGRAPHY

Carlos Almarez, 1941 - 1989

As part of PST/LA/LA, The Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art (LACMA) shows a survey of painting from the prolific and prodigiously gifted Carlos Almaraz, who died too young of AIDS in 1989. From 1973-83, Almaraz was part of a Chicano (though that term was new) Collective, called Los Four, which included Frank Romero, Gilbert Magu Lujan, and Roberto de la Rocha. They worked together, painted and sculpted many of the same images (cars, cacti, dogs, chairs, flames) as they developed a Chicano lexicon of imagery. They are all being recognized anew. Frank Romero just had an outstanding retrospective at MOLAA last spring and Gilbert Magu Lujan will have a huge retrospective (over 200 works) at UCI this fall. The fourth member, Roberto de la Rocha, unfortunately destroyed all his works, went into seclusion for 20 years and is just now rejoining the Los Angeles artistic community.  - from Nancy Kay Turner, blog on RIOT AWARE.   

Carlos Almarez was born in Mexico City, but grew up in Chicago, where his father worked in steel mills, returning to Mexico City for visits. He was introduced to art there in the city museums and streets. 

The family moved to Los Angeles, and Carlos lived in various parts of LA, graduating from Garfield High School. He knocked about sampling art programs at LACC, CSULA, Loyola Marymount, UCLA, in New York City, and earned a degree at Otis Art Institute.

As a child he was molested by an uncle and a Catholic priest. When offered a scholarship from LMU, he declined it because the school supported the Vietnam war. He involved himself with Cesar Chavez and the struggle for agricultural workers' rights, leaving it because he felt stifled by the need to be political when he wanted to be personally expressive.

He repudiated his Catholic upbringing as an adult, and lived bi-sexually, during the time when gender and sexual experience were surfacing socially as lived realities. In 1971 he nearly died of pancreatitis and experienced God during the convalescence. 

His life is marked by every scar the conflicted turbulent times could make upon a life.  

At 48 he died of AIDS complications, leaving a wife and child.  We are left bemused to to think what a second half's visions would have been, haunted by the specter of early artistic death and empty wondering.