“After A Hundred Years of Solitude” by Aramis Gutierrez, courtesy of David Castillo Gallery

There is nothing like painting to take us out of the everyday and into the realm of imagination. Think about it — is it a coincidence that we’ve become a postcapitalist “virtual” culture? Unlike its avant-garde predecessors of last century, contemporary painting trends don’t have to seek new and newer forms. What artists need is familiarity with history, up-to-date cut-and-paste techniques and plenty of imagination. 

This is where artist Aramis Gutierrez comes in, with his recent debut show Even Now in the Final Hour of My Life, I’m Falling in Love Again at David Castillo Gallery in Wynwood. Gutierrez, a Venezuelan-American and graduate of Cooper Union, has everything going for him. His generation belongs to a moment (paraphrasing critic Arthur Danto) “after the end of art,” an epoch of stylistic freedom and creative puzzlement, when artists look back to comment on the ups and downs of art history.

First, the exhibition’s affected title, which comes from a Morrissey song (that Smiths ex-front man, a rare bird with several incarnations): “How is this young artist looking at his present as if it was his last hour?” “Be aware” was a motto of the Romantics. They, like Gutierrez, felt they were at a cultural crossroad. That’s why the show presents itself as a detached biographical account in which the artist portrays himself as a Goethian hero of the “dreadful and wondrous,” defying time and space.

Then, Gutierrez borrows avidly from different conventions and styles: Latin American magical realism, 19th-century seascape genre, pop, comics and plenty of dark humor. Gutierrez’s paintings are big, dramatic and succulent. These canvases have the feel of illustrations, vignettes from comic books or selections from a storyboard sequence, amplified and carefully presented in the gallery just for our private enjoyment.    

“Caracas in Civil War” is a futuristic perspective of the Venezuelan capital as seen from the high coastal sierra, with distant buildings set ablaze by social chaos. The expressively rendered reddish hues of the early evening, mixed with rising smoke from the city, exude a romantic, Turner-like resemblance. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” imagines the last chapter of García Marquez’s eponymous novel, with the painter as Aureliano Babilonia (one of the book’s protagonists) inside the eye of a tornado, his body upside down hovering over the town of Macondo (it’s really New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward during Hurricane Katrina), as he examines the last pages of his family’s chronicle. It is at this point in García Marquez’s narrative when Aureliano realizes that his life is a hallucination within a cursed city beyond memory. 

Gutierrez’s violent and perplexing humor makes me think of lowbrow American artists Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes. Don’t we all live in a world predetermined by unpredictable and inescapable forces? In “Lazy Sunbathers,” a man wakes up from his siesta with his skin filled with nasty blisters. His screaming does not even impress his female companion, who glibly flirts with a man outside the painting. “Floridian” (on Castillo’s Web site, but not included in this exhibition) shows a bather’s face buried by a swift gush of sand and water falling from the sky. It’s the same fate of a couple of fishermen in “Brief Return of the Megalodon,” as their ship is unexpectedly rammed from behind by a big-jawed, 50-foot-long prehistoric shark.     

I was taken by “The ’80s,” a big dramatic canvas that depicts Gutierrez driving a big racing boat on the high seas amid an imminent storm. As massive waves rise and cave in, a flock of seagulls flee the doom, but the driver looks forward in total oblivion of the danger. Gutierrez’s painting bears striking resemblance to Winslow Homer’s “The Gulf Stream,” where an impassive black fisherman lies inside a tilting boat surrounded by sharks in a tumultuous sea.

Gutierrez’s panache for quoting and mixing stuff into iconoclastic sweeping gestures shows potential. It brings me back to Winslow Homer and one of his followers, novelist Henry James, who said that Homer’s art succeeded because he was able to choose the least pictorial range of scenery and manipulate it as if it were pictorial.

Even Now in the Final Hour of My Life, I’m Falling in Love Again, is showing through Feb. 28 at David Castillo Gallery, 2234 N.W. Second Ave., Miami. For more information, call 305- 573-8110 or visit www.castilloart.com.