ALEX RUBIO: Paintings and Drawings
“Street Altar – El Quarto, La Vela, El Duro”
San Antonio artist Alex Rubio’s powerful, mesmerizing and electrifying work closes this Sunday, October 4 at 4:00 pm. This is Rubio’s first one-man show in Los Angeles. His work speaks of the Latino experience in a fiery fantastical world. His palate of brilliant hues, and use of high contrast explodes onto the canvas in swirling and undulating waves, as if each stroke transmits energy vibrating around and within the body. No stasis here. Rubio’s large-scale black and white drawings reflect that same intensity — sans color. Coming from a background as a street artist, San Antonio artist Alex Rubio, nicknamed “El Diablito,” began his career as a young muralist working in a housing project. Since the beginning, he developed his talent by serving his community as an instructor for youth creating graffiti-influenced murals on the walls of his city. He is a mentor to aspiring and developing artists, some of whom have already achieved national recognition. Rubio taught in an after-school high school arts program, was an art instructor at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, and became the artist in residence for the Inmate Creative Arts Program at Bexar County Jail. He works with the inmates on murals, handkerchiefs, and other traditional forms of inmate art. He has also curated exhibits of their work and has included some with his own work. He is a living legend and a hero to the city of San Antonio because of what he gives back to his community.
True to the nature of Chicano mural art, Rubio’s work retains a socio-political content. Using an urban contemporary aesthetic, Alex Rubio depicts primarily his Chicano neighborhood and roots, while also speaking to an issue very close to his community — the issue of war, violence and vices. Informed by experiences working with youth through mural projects, Rubio’s images project a deeply informed and panoramic aesthetic. These large-scale oil and acrylic paintings are built-up with hotly-hued lines wrapped in layers that generate energy and soul.
Rubio is a very important contributor to the Chicano Art Movement. His work has been included in Four Horsemen, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2006); Contemporary Wall Painting, UTSA Art Gallery, TX (2005); Arte Caliente: Selections from the Joe A. Diaz Collection, South Texas Institute for the Arts, Corpus Christi, TX (2004); and Chicano Visions: Painters on the Verge, Cheech Marin Collection, San Antonio Museum of Art, TX (traveling exhibition) (2001). In 2007, Alex received the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation award for painters and sculptors. He studied at San Antonio Art Institute; and on a fine arts scholarship, at the University of Texas, San Antonio. Later he studied printmaking with Sam Coronado*. Rubio has exhibited throughout the southwestern United States, as well as New York and Puerto Rico.
Alex Rubio is one of Cheech Marin’s collected artists in the Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge exhibition. He is widely collected.
This must see exhibition of Rubio’s electrifying work closes this Sunday, October 4 at 4:00 pm.
*Coronado Studio opened in 1991 out of Sam Coronado’s personal art studio. A trip to Self-Help Graphics, a community art center in Los Angeles, inspired Coronado to transform his studio into a printmaking studio devoted to serigraph (silk screen). Hoping to attract more artists, and especially Latina/o artists, to the medium, Coronado founded the Serie Project <https://www.serieproject.org/> . In its ten-year history, over 150 artists have come through the Coronado Studio to create original prints.
Closing Sunday, October 4, 2009
