OUT OF THE ‘CACOPHONY’ OF THE AMERICAS ...
L.A. ARTIST EAMON ORE-GIRON FINDS ELEGANT PATTERNS
WHAT CAN BE conveyed with a circle, a square or a slender band of color? Perhaps it’s an outline of architecture. Or a pattern that summons a musical beat. Or the sensation in the retina when sunlight slips between mountain peaks and illuminates the landscape. Maybe it’s the histories, brutal and sublime, embedded in some of those forms.
This is some of what materializes in “Infinite Regress,” a painting series by Los Angeles artist Eamon Ore-Giron, on view through late May at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. In his solo show, “Competing with Lightning / Rivalizando con el relámpago,” linen canvases, earthy in appearance, serve as backdrops to cosmic arrangements of circles and rays of gradient color that recede into the horizon. It’s all framed by stepped architectonic structures rendered in luminous gold.
His elemental patterns can be found across cultures — in ancient temples or the early 20th century paintings of Russian suprematist Kazimir Malevich. But the ways in which OreGiron brings them together and remixes them is singular.
“When I started to think about what is my take on abstraction,” he says in his Eastside studio, “I always saw it through the lens of lineage.”
That lineage contains many threads.
Ore-Giron, 48, is the son of an Indigenous father from Peru and an Irish American mother from Arizona. He was born and raised in Tucson, but has spent periods in Mexico City, San Francisco and Guadalajara.
He spent a formative stint in Huancayo, a mining and agricultural hub in the central Peruvian highlands where his family is from — a region with deep traditions in music and dance. There, in the late 1990s, he apprenticed with Peruvian painter Josué Sánchez, an artist whose work draws, in modern ways, from Andean art and craft.
“He taught me how to use highly saturated colors in ways that could give them a bit more weight,” says Ore-Giron. “When you think of highly saturated colors, you think of Latin American work. In architecture, you think of [Luis] Barragán. Those are colors that in the palette of minimalism in the U.S. — no, you would never do that. [Josué] gave me license to explore that in a sophisticated way.”
In Ore-Giron’s early figurative paintings, that brilliant color palette materialized in scenes tinged by the surreal.
At the MCA Denver are “Cookin’ 1” and “Cookin’ 2,” both from 2002, which show his aunt and his cousin making humitas, Peruvian fresh-corn tamales. It’s an intimate scene, until you move in close and realize the kitchen walls resemble the sky and the women’s bodies are penetrated by wisps of clouds.
What might a 21st century mountain spirit look like? Perhaps like two women cooking.
Other early works feature chonguinada dancers, who don rosy-cheeked masks to parody colonial Spaniards. Ore-Giron set these against horizons of flat color, giving the dancers an otherworldly feel. Some canvases feature a recurring mestizo character from Andean folklore known as El Chuto.
“He is kind of magical and he’s a clown. He’s mischievous,” says Ore-Giron. “I’ve always identified with that character as an artist. The clown in this dance is kind of serious and has serious undertones.”
Ore-Giron is an affable figure, an enthusiastic conversationalist who, in a single sitting, can veer from the multimedia canvases of Peruvian Modernist Jorge Eielson to the performances of German conceptualist Joseph Beuys to a wild anecdote about inhabiting a tiny room in Mexico City that once served as a chicken dwelling. In between, he might jam in a comic analysis of himself as the hybrid son of a Peruvian immigrant father and American mother — what he calls “this identity of being half.”
“I think my father is the coca leaf and I’m the cocaine,” he says. “He was this pure leaf that grew out of the ground. I’m the processed, mind-altering product for the American market.”
After leaving Arizona, OreGiron completed his undergraduate degree at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996. In 2004, he landed at UCLA, where he completed his master’s degree in fine arts. Since then, Los Angeles has been home base — though he has lived abroad and in other parts of the U.S. for short spells.
This peripatetic life perhaps accounts for the polyglot nature of his artistic career.
In addition to painting, OreGiron has created videos inspired by Peruvian mining towns and created installations out of musical instruments. Over the years, his work has popped up at the Hammer Museum‘s “Made in L.A.” biennial and an exhibition about cultural power at SFMOMA.
He’s also worked with other artists — including collaborations with Tijuana-born artist Julio Cesar Morales. Calling themselves Los Jaichackers, the pair once crafted a room-size mirrored cube that functioned as sculptural listening station and remix studio. It was a part of the 2008 group exhibition “Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement” at the L.A. County Museum of Art.
Their separate work, “Subterreanean Homesick Cumbia,” is in the show “Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art” at East L.A.’s Vincent Price Art Museum.
The piece was inspired by a legend about the accordion’s arrival in South America. As the story goes, a German ship loaded with instruments sunk near the mouth of the Magdalena River, depositing accordions all over Colombia’s shores. In their video, Los Jaichackers return the instrument to its watery origins; an accordion bobs alongside a riverboat to a bubbling soundtrack of cumbia.
Music is not incidental to Ore-Giron’s work.
He has a deep knowledge of Latin American music — of the sort pumped at working-class dance parties — and a longrunning side hustle as a DJ. As DJ Lengua — “DJ Tongue,” in case you’re wondering — he has been part of a musical movement that has dipped into cumbia of the Mexican, Colombian and Peruvian variety and made it groovier: slowing it down and fusing it with the sounds of electronica.
With fellow DJ Sonido Franko (Joseph Franko, who is based in the Bay Area), Ore-Giron once established a small record label, Unicornio Records, whose claim to fame is that it released Chicano Batman’s first album.
The fame, however, is only in hindsight, since that first album was a flop. “We had a thousand records,” recalls Ore-Giron, referring to real-deal vinyl, his preferred musical medium. “When a thousand records come to your house — it’s like twice the size of a barbecue. And they are really heavy.”
THAT EXPERIENCE didn’t stop him from pursuing other musical projects. Last month, he teamed up with Samy Ben Redjeb of the Analog Africa label to release a compilation of hallucinatory cumbias rebajadas, the reduced-tempo cumbias popularized by Mexican sonideros beginning in the 1960s. “Saturno 2000: La Rebajada de Los Sonideros,” as the album is titled, is a trippy tour of synth-soaked tunes from all over the continent made extra spacey by their languid pace.
Yet as critical as music is to Ore-Giron’s life, it is painting to which he has devoted the most focus over the last half-dozen years. “I had to be honest with myself and be like, you’re a painter, you’ve always been a painter,’ ” he says, “and you don’t have multiple lives to live.”
It is on his paintings that the Denver exhibition is focused.
This includes early figurative works and canvases from his “Talking S—” series. The series, begun in 2017, engages deities of pre-colonial myth — deities that have become a daily part of Latin American iconography: the Aztec gods Coatlicue and Quetzalcoatl, as well as Andean serpent deity Amaru. Deployed as national symbols by 20th century Indigenism movements, these gods now materialize in murals, restaurant menus and earrings on Etsy.
Ore-Giron digests them through the language of art.
“It’s a subversion,” he says. “How do you refine a Modernist aesthetic and blend it with some aspect of Indigenous design and forms that are inspiring and beautiful and tie it into the legacy Indigenismo?”
There’s a lot going on beneath his spare forms.
His “Infinite Regress” paintings, however, are Ore-Giron’s best-known works. Begun in 2015, they elegantly synthesize the myriad strains that have engaged his interests over time. The linen, in its raw, unprimed state, conveys brownness of earth and skin, plus the rough texture of textiles. Motifs echo Andean Indigenous architecture, with its endless ascending steps — a design that appears frequently in Inca textiles and functions as a symbol of transition, from one worldly state into the next.
His palette, ranging from brilliant orange and blue to crepuscular pinks and purples, seems to evoke land, sky and light in its myriad reflective and refractive states. Of course, there is gold: the ore for which Peru is known, the ore stripped from Inca temples then shipped to Spain, the ore associated in the pre-Hispanic era with the divine power of the sun, the ore transformed into economic asset by colonialism.
“People love ‘Infinite Regress,’ they are gorgeous works,” says MCA curator Miranda Lash, who organized the show. “But the conceptual motivations behind the paintings should not be sanitized. These are not just renderings of celestial bodies. There are direct references to the motivations behind colonialism. There’s a deliberateness in the choice of materials and colors.”
If the pieces also feel as if they have a rhythm and cadence, it’s perhaps because they contain music in their fabrication.
The circular patterns in OreGiron’s paintings are achieved by tracing the acetate dubplates he employs as a DJ. As the artist tells Jace Clayton (known as DJ Rupture) in a conversation published in the show’s catalog: “I’m interested in the synesthetic quality to the paintings.”
Certainly, there is a dynamism to the works that can’t easily be conveyed in photographs.
In photographs, Ore-Giron’s paintings can look flat. But in the MCA Denver’s galleries, which are punctured by skylights, it’s another story. On the windy April morning I visited the museum, the light conditions seemed to be continuously shifting. When a cloud was overhead, the paintings grew quiet; when the sun returned, the colors and the shimmer of gold came chattering back to life. It was a remarkable effect.
Ore-Giron’s art can elude tidy categorization. How do you sum up work that has engaged so many materials and so many ideas over time? How do you pin a label on an artist whose life has been defined by having each foot in many places at once?
“My work is about identity on some level,” says the artist. “It’s not the insecurity of identity, but a reflection of identity. The reflection of this kaleidoscopic effect of Latin America. When people talked about pan-Americanism, people think of this idea of unity, but it’s a cacophony. It is still a cacophony.”
That cacophony, in OreGiron’s hands, can be stirringly, cosmically beautiful.