Art review: Former News critic delivers 'Spanish Lesson'
Artist-critic offers weird, wonderful view south of border
During more than 20 years as The News’ art critic (and several as its theater critic), Richard Huntington constantly and eloquently demonstrated his encyclopedic knowledge of art history and provided keen and often quirky insight into the work of countless artists in the area’s galleries and museums.
But throughout his long and productive writing career, Huntington has also been a prolific artist, one hitherto precluded (for reasons of journalistic independence) from exhibiting in his hometown. Thus it was with great anticipation that his first major local show since 1979 opened in the Collectors Gallery of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in June. And thus it is with some trepidation (and the disclosure that I know the artist slightly and am now standing in his outsized professional shoes) that I proffer an opinion on Huntington’s latest body of work.
It’s gloriously weird. First of all because its subject matter — the folk art, history and language of Mexico, where Huntington and his wife, Wendy, keep their winter home — deviates from that of many of Huntington’s earlier works. Secondly, because of the unlikely juxtapositions it contains: violence embedded in cartoonish innocence, grand decorative flourishes plopped without reservation into the middle of military portraits, rustic punctuation marks sprouting from an artistic soil that seems unlikely to produce them.
Huntington states his theme, if you want to pin one on him, with great wit. The painting “La naturaleza muerta con papas fritas y asesinato,” which translates to “Still Life with French Fries and Murder,” is separated into four quadrants respectively containing an electric fan, a pile of french fries and a bird cage. The fourth features the barely perceptible but recognizably violent outline of one figure (or is it two?) engaged in some unspeakable, green-tinged evil. The piece neatly delineates Huntington’s intention to simultaneously elicit feelings of contentment and tragedy and establishes a template for the curious “tragi-comic tone” he set out to achieve.
In the rest of the show, the tidy separations between mundane and devious that announce themselves in Huntington’s still life break down and merge into strange and multihued elements much more difficult to discern and thus more rewarding to the viewer’s effort.
The show is peppered with references to Mexico’s military history (revolutionary generals Juan Aldama, Emiliano Zapata and others make appearances), pop cultural elements like Pepsi advertisements and pin-up models and decorative scrollwork from towns in central Mexico that occasionally breaks down into apostrophes or quotation marks — a clear connection to Huntington’s skill, and perhaps struggle, with applying the limits of language to the infinite landscape of visual art. The influence of Mexican graphic artist Jose Guadalupe Posada appears often, mostly as the grim counterpoint to the show’s levity, and is almost always inserted into Huntington’s paintings as their most abstracted or sketchy elements.
The opposite is true in “Leccion de vocabulario” or “Vocabulary Lesson,” in which Huntington has created a vivid street scene involving police officers, a dead figure lying in the street and a frightened woman scurrying away from the whole affair. Peppered throughout the
piece are basic Spanish vocabulary words like “calle” (street) and “la muchacha” (the girl) in school-book type, creating a confusing mix of innocence and violence that comes as close as any piece in the show to achieving that disturbing tone Huntington wrote about in his artist statement.
Taken as a whole, the show creates a sense of the artist happily surrounding himself with a new environment (as in Huntington’s self-portrait, in which he has encased his face in a frame of Mexican scrollwork). And as Huntington wraps his mind around the quirks and treasures of his adopted Mexican home, we happily learn with him. His peculiar, colorful and surprising “Spanish Lesson” is well worth taking.•
REVIEW
WHAT: “Spanish Lesson:
Works on Paper by Richard Huntington”
WHEN: Through Sunday
WHERE: Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Collectors Gallery), 1285 Elmwood Ave.
TICKETS: $8 to $10; free for members
INFO: 882-8700 or
www.albrightknox.org
