Cultural Renegade

Pedro Vizcaino’s paintings deliver a wake-up call

By Alfredo Triff

Don’t miss Matter Attacks, a show by Miami artist Pedro Vizcaino, at Arturo Mosquera’s Farside Gallery in Westchester. For the past five years, Vizcaino, a Cuban artist of the 1980s generation in Havana, has been producing drawings, etchings, paintings and sculptures. Mostly images of airplanes, taxis and guns, they look primitive, messy, as if made in a hurry. Lately, these forms have permutated into a bizarre Maximalist anthropomorphic amalgam.

Part outsider, part cultural renegade, Vizcaino exhibits an influence of Jackson Pollock’s dripping, Phillip Guston’s caricature, the saturated color of CoBRA artist Karel Appel and the primitivism of a Jean-Michel Basquiat. His graffiti consciousness has a Pop feel to it mixed with a 1970s political defiance. It was a time in a world out of joint, right at the beginning of the hip-hop culture, a moment to vent the pent-up anger with a promised utopian ideal gone astray.

Fast forward three decades. What now? It’s pretty much the same. Neither global capitalism nor the digital revolution necessarily delivered us from our wasted anomie. If art can wake us up from the slumber, it needs to deliver. The more blatant the better, which may explain the artist’s aggressive, compulsive execution, at times off-putting. 

Vizcaino’s concoctions seem to come out of the paper, jumping and jiving. One can try to describe the process: It all goes into this mass of crosshatch, wiggles, webs of eight shapes and loops in the middle of the space. What’s left is untouched white, except a corner or a border, finger-smudged with harsh colors. No fancy embellishments here. What counts is the delivery, brutal, and empty of the dissident didacticism of yesteryear.

The graffiti-like style is not trying to become calligraphic, nor embellish the space with a linguistic “signature.” This is more pragmatics than semantics; more the “how” than the “what.” A sort of poster without text, conveying bursts of semi-abstract vibrant shapes, dancing to a raucous, implicit though inaudible, funky beat.

Vizcaino’s Ganguero series is the most accomplished of the exhibit. It deserves a close scrutiny: We witness the human shape reduced, perfunctorily condensed as convoluted gun parts; only the trigger and the revolver’s foresight remain unaffected by the formal upheaval. The gun’s grip turns into a boot’s heels with popping amphibian eyes and protuberant lips; the gun’s grip and cuff (a torso?) twists into a teeth-like menacing ribbing; the body a jolted sort of cylinder arrangement with each piston becoming a finger, a branch, a loose coil, a cell phone, a light bulb, a Ja! (an expletive in Spanish).

Not far stylistically is Vizcaino’s boisterously colorful Airplane series, shaded in purple, red and yellow (don’t miss the reddish puff-fish-looking B-26). Instead of bombs, these early Cold War aircraft deliver a needed message: WAKE UP! Vizcaino’s paintings definitely have a beat to them. You won’t hear it, but it’s all there: the bass overdrive, the humming low frequency pounding your ear with cacophonic verses shot out by a young male voice right in your face.

Imagine a cross between Cuban rap act Free-hole Negro and the tropical force of the Tego Calderón from El Enemy de los Guasíbiri with text by Notorius BIG: If I wasn't in the rap game/ I'd probably have a key knee deep in the crack game/ Because the streets is a short stop/ Either you're slingin crack rock or you got a wicked jumpshot.

Pedro Vizcaino’s Matter Attacks will be showing through June 10 at the Farside Gallery, 1305 Galloway Road (at 87th Avenue) in Westchester.

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