Honor among thieves Brandon Maldonado’s Neo-Picassoism
Spanish painter Pablo Picasso faced accusations of cultural appropriation in his lifetime. Despite his detractors, he understood the fact that artists, in general, don’t work in isolation, free from all influence. When he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, he included a plethora of influences, from Iberian art to El Greco to the Primitivism of Gauguin. Perhaps there was justification in the appraisal of cultural theft — the African masks he painted in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which he encountered in Paris’ Musée de l’Homme, were part of the cultural patrimony belonging to a continent subjugated under European colonialism, not all of which ended up in Western museums by ethical means.
But one thing Les Demoiselles, one of the most recognizable examples of Cubism, wasn’t — was a flat-out copy of any of the things it referenced. It was something the art world, even in the early days of modernism, hadn’t seen before. “I grew up in the graffiti world, and if your artwork looks like someone else’s in that world, they call you a biter,” said Albuquerquebased artist Brandon Maldonado, whose exhibition Neo-Picassoism is on view at Pop Gallery. “But the older you get, and the more you learn about art history, paintings have more to do with other paintings than they do with real life.” Neo-Picassoism opened on July 1, but the show’s reception on Saturday, July 28, takes place in conjunction with #enchanted505, Pop Gallery’s annual Spanish Market group show. The exhibit features works by Marie Sena, Robb Rael, Jodie
“The older you get, and the more you learn about art history, paintings have more to do with other paintings than they do with real life.” — Brandon Maldonado
Herrera, and Daniel Martin Diaz, among others. The location on Lincoln Avenue puts the gallery smack in the middle of Contemporary Hispanic Market, which is produced independently of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society’s annual market on the Plaza.
Aspects of Cubism, the artistic style pioneered by Picasso and Georges Braque, appear in Maldonado’s compositions, but they don’t define them. Mostly, it’s the faces of his subjects that bear the hallmarks of his style: the reassembling of representational features into abstract, geometricized forms that allow them to be seen from a multiplicity of perspectives. “In referencing Picasso, it’s so easy to make paintings exactly like his, but I was inspired to somehow push it into a different direction,” he said.
Maldonado’s Neo-Picassoism is not a large body of work. The gallery is showing less than a dozen pieces. But he develops the compositions slowly. He first began experimenting with Cubism in 2012, inspired by the thought of what a painting of a nun done by Picasso would look like if it had been rendered in a baroque style. Maldonado’s own work was dominated at the time by the calaveras of Día de los Muertos and other aspects of Mexican culture. A Picasso-esque nun intrigued him enough to take on the subject himself. “Trying to mix that Old World classical with very modern stuff was fascinating for me, and it slowly evolved over the years into what it is now,” he said. It is the first solo exhibition of this body of work. “I’ve probably done about eight to 10 paintings in that direction since that time. The style evolved to the point where it was a nice marriage between abstraction and more curvilinear stuff people are familiar with me doing. At first, I was calling it the
Picasso Thief series, and I was going to sign them ‘Picasso’ and then cross it out and put ‘Thief.’ ”
The artist was born in Denver and raised in Albuquerque from the time he was in first grade. He first started exploring Día de los Muertos-themed artwork in college. Multiple trips to Mexico, beginning when he was a student in high school, led him to develop a fascination with the people and culture across the border, which persists in his current work. His La Calavera Catrina, for instance, takes one of the more popular icons of the holiday observed throughout Mexico — the figure of a female skeleton, first depicted in the work of lithographer José Guadalupe Posada as a satirical portrait of a Mexican native influenced by European culture — and presents her visage in the angular lines of Cubist geometry. His
La Quinceañera is a Cubist take on a girl’s comingof-age ceremony, showing its young subject being attended to by relatives. And Tierra o Muerte, which translates as “land or death,” a slogan dating to the days of Mexican Revolution, appropriated by supporters of the 1967 raid on the Río Arriba County Courthouse in New Mexico in protest of government land grabs, depicts a Cubist revolutionary soldier. His bandolier is lined with bullets, his rifle in hand, and his face is rendered in profile and straight on simultaneously. “In a couple weeks will be my second trip to Mexico this year,” Maldonado said. “I’m inspired by the different way of life, the culture, and the pace. I wanted to show homage to the things that I saw. I was in Puebla in January and saw these images of the China poblana [the traditional Puebla dress style], and there’s a piece in there where a girl is wearing a China poblana dress. There’s a piece on view at the Spanish Colonial Museum of a beggar with this Quetzalcoatl head.”
Maldonado has two other works currently on view at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts in the exhibit GenNext: Future So Bright. Each one a narrative, together they show the contrasts between the American citizen’s and the migrant’s experiences of crossing the U.S. border. “The American goes to party and have a good time, while the other one dies in the desert,” he said. “Mexico is an inspiring place, but the people are having a hard time and I wanted to do something to honor them and put the Picasso style into a different cultural context.”
Three works in Neo-Picassoism deviate somewhat from the rest in that they dazzle with vibrant psychedelia inspired by the designs of the indigenous Huichol people of Mexico. “I was watching a documentary on the Huichol that followed them on an annual pilgrimage to gather peyote plants. It takes them like a week or two to get there. Then they do the peyote and have the hallucinogenic experiences. I never thought of their artwork in that context, but these guys are making psychedelic artwork inspired by their peyote rituals, and that explains to me all the colors you see in their yarn work and bead work. It’s an important aspect of the indigenous visual language, and I wanted to play with that a little in those paintings.”
One may look on Maldonado’s art as a kind of re-appropriation after Picasso did it first, but he intended Neo-Picassoism as more of an homage to the artist than a critique. His own visual lexicon is distinct, tied to the cultural dimensions of a specific national identity. The Cubist style, within this context, is not the dominant theme, but merely the lens through which the motifs of Mexican culture and heritage are viewed. One can’t help but see the Cubist abstraction as indicating a remove from the subject matter on the part of the viewer. We are on our side of the border and, from this vantage point, seeing not clearly but abstractly. Like the masks obscuring the faces in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Cubism is itself a kind of obfuscation. Without the Spanish painter’s influence on Maldonado’s work, the reading would be very different — but not necessarily more authentic. “I think it’s important to see what’s been done in the past and try to find where you belong,” he said.