Exhibit review: Armando Romero: XX Century Parade

by Manny Mendoza of THE Magazine

The Mexican artist's brand of studied, yet offhand eclecticism layers pop-culture detritus on classically realistic portraiture.

Did a graffiti artist break into the MAC and deface Old Master paintings with chalk doodles, thought clouds, and stickers of Looney Tunes characters? No, it's just wacky art-historicist Armando Romero at work. The Mexican artist's brand of studied, yet offhand eclecticism layers pop-culture detritus on classically realistic portraiture to suggest the wide plethora of imagery that afflicts the human mind in our postmodern age. Mr. Romero starts with figures respectfully rendered in the painterly style of traditional art periods, faux-worn to look old, before adding elements that might appear to disrespect those periods. But respect comes in his detailed execution of each element.

The painting that greets you, Beyond Good and Evil, 2007, depicts a man and woman standing stoically behind bicycles. He's wearing a black body suit topped by bunny-ear antennas; she's donning a white outfit of shorts, ruffled blouse, and angel wings. To further undercut the old-fashioned pose, the canvas is marred by crude chalk drawings and cutout cartoon figures -- Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote, Snidely Whiplash -- like an urban-street poster that's been victimized. Mr. Romero takes a similar tack in Familiar Faces, 2008, All or Nothing, 2008, and Pork Flakes (The Gladiator), 2006, which poses a shirtless wrestler in front of a mural of pigs. The artist then paints dozens of Porky Pigs in the foreground. He varies his approach slightly in Heroes of the Silver Screen, 2008, which takes the viewer into the minds of three film workers, each pondering in a thought bubble a trio of related icons: Lion, Tin Man, Scarecrow; Three Stooges; Dracula, Frankenstein, Werewolf.

The epic in the exhibition, a three-gallery show that includes work on display in New York and Los Angeles, is Trafico. A cop directs a collection of figures and scenes: a bloody car wreck, The Beatles crossing Abbey Road, the Flintstones. Mr. Romero's sculptures are less layered than his paintings, but the humor remains. The disturbingly funny tension in Grand Pierrot, 2008, rises from his use of an elegant material, marble, to portray a pointy headed, red-nosed clown. The bronzes Clowns, 2008, and The Elephant, 2008, are more plainly disturbing. Clowns depicts three angst-ridden figures, one with two heads at the end of his arms, while The Giant places a lion and other jungle cats at the feet of a hunch-shouldered man-beast.

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