Carlos Almaraz and the City of Dreams

Los Angeles, a city where dreams are made, destroyed, or both. That is the subject of a show of work by the preeminent Chicano artist Carlos Almaraz now on view at Marc Selwyn Fine Art. It may be that place—where things happen—is as important as time in the unfolding of history.

In this process Carlos is an outsider. Born in Mexico City in 1941, he comes to the United States shortly after with his family, first to Chicago and then at age 10 to Los Angeles, which becomes home. From an early age Carlos apparently dreams of being an artist. Not surprisingly, this entails a sojourn to New York City, art capital of the world in the 1960s. With the then prevailing currents of abstraction and minimalism, Carlos finds himself largely out of place. 

Back in Los Angeles, he earns an MFA at Otis College of Art and Design, which grounds him in solid studio practice and the outlines of a prodigious grasp of art history. In the early seventies, he throws himself full force into the Chicano Civil Rights struggle, el Movimiento, especially César Chávez’s United Farm Workers where he creates murals in the tradition of the great Mexican muralists— Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Carlos is a founding member of Los Four, a legendary collective who bring Latino bicultural art into an institutional setting for the first time. Ultimately Carlos returns to private studio practice but the thrust of these activities remains: whether public or personal, art should be real, accessible, and about life. 

The gallery exhibition, curated by Rafael Barrientos Martinez, chronicles work in and about Los Angeles over the last decade of Carlos’s incredibly prolific artistic production, from 1979 to 1989. With the exception of the bath pictures, the works are all exterior landscapes so we don’t see the many interior scenes depicting private, intimate, off camera life that Carlos also painted. Regardless, the extent to which he mined nineteenth century French painting for his own psychological and emotional ends is everywhere evident. Take Beach Scene from 1981 (included in Installation View above), which starts out perhaps as a Eugene Boudin seascape—beach in lower third with viewer slightly elevated, looking across at blue sea becoming blue-green sky in the top two thirds of the picture frame. Instead of the French bourgeoisie fully dressed in hats and bonnets, parading with parasols, the figures in Carlos’s painting are fanned out across the beach, resembling so many Thiebaud-like gestures of paint in the sand. People go to the beach now to be alone—a social observation as much as an emotional one.

At the same time, quite startlingly, come the car crashes. To my eye these represent Carlos’s style fully developed and independent; it’s hard to find precedents for them either in subject matter or stylistically. There’s nothing like it. Much has been written about what Carlos himself understood as the clash of cultures, the car as an American icon gone up in flames. Indeed, many of the crashes appear as more or less apocalyptic, set in mostly empty settings with cars exploding and careening off the sides of stacked freeways or lonely highways. 

What is striking about Come Fly With Me (1980)—an early crash—is that it is set in a full blown California landscape with California light. Blue hills taper downward from left to right, with deep green grass on either side of a cream-colored road. In this landscape, the viewer is placed at eye level with the midair crash itself, directly in line with the fiery palette and wild energy of abstract expressionist brush strokes in red, yellow and orange. As background, wispy white cloud cover swoops upward in the direction of the hurtling yellow car. Off to the right is a Pop Art billboard ironically advertising air travel, with the image of a jet flying above turbulent air; in the upper right a real jet soars noiselessly into space, visible as a glint of silver paint. Everything is there.

Yet at the same time this scene is almost elemental in character—earth, air, fire—set in an idyllic landscape that memorializes the event. A car crash is a nightmare scenario to be sure, but the unmistakable energy that the painting captures is one of exhilaration at the moment of impact—suggesting that the picture is really about something else, something more abstract. And also providing a window on what seems to me another hallmark of Carlos’s work: his ability to paint drop dead beautiful pictures almost regardless of subject.

West Coast Crash (1982) is another even more monumental example, included in the Museum of Modern Art survey of Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century (1993), in which Carlos was the only contemporary Mexican-American artist. This version has the same hills as Come Fly With Me but here the viewer is positioned closer to road level, which frames the very bottom of the picture. It’s a much grittier scene, more apocalyptic with burnt brown on the far side of the road and dark smoke filling the air. The car is turned on its side, where the mangled undercarriage is rendered in thick impasto paint. Carlos often painted vertical freeway crashes but here he uses exaggerated horizontal space not only to turn the convention of beautiful landscape painting on its head, but also it seems to me as a surrogate for time. We track that the car has hit another at the left edge of the picture; then, as a consequence, experience its utter destruction in a long stretch of canvas painted as desolate road, measured by unpoetic syncopated white and black road lines, and coming to a stop as a useless burning wreck.

Almost at the opposite end of the spectrum are the natural scenes of Echo Park, which Carlos painted at all times of the day and night. On view in the show is one of four large panels from the acknowledged masterwork Echo Park Lake (1982); this panel, from the far right end of the group, shows the lake in late afternoon light, heading toward sunset. The debt to Monet and his water lilies is clear stylistically but the intent is very different. Monet’s early water lily paintings have always a careful, refined representational strategy, becoming increasingly abstract and immersive in later pictures from the series. But the objective is always the same: a very fine-tuned, unruffled aesthetic experience, akin perhaps to the late novels of Henry James.     

Echo Park is no Giverny but rather a neighborhood greenspace in the urban setting of East LA, with a freeway immediately behind the vantage point of the viewer. It goes without saying that the park is shown in an idyllic, if not surreal way—a Monet with palm trees! At least since the Renaissance a pastoral setting has been associated with art, a place where imaginary things happen and conflicts are worked out. In Echo Park Lake, what looks like a long wooden bridge marks the transition over water to the interior space of the park, sometimes painted in night scenes as a steeper Venetian style bridge that signals entrance into a more exotic dreamscape (as in Vertical Lake, 1983, far right in gallery installation image above). In the full 4-panel work, Carlos broadly uses color to mark the passage of time, but he also uses light to capture moments of stillness. We see this especially in the sharp play of light and shadow on the straight bows of the palm trees in early morning light, near the center of the complete work, as well as in the backlit bows and deep shadows of the night panel at left. 

Almost as a foil is the continually changing character of the water. Carlos often painted night scenes of Echo Park where the palette and glare of light on water create a very dreamlike if not outright lurid atmosphere, as appears in Vertical Lake. Here, in the Echo Park Lake panels, night is shown more softly, darker, with the glare from artificial light igniting pinks and blues and greens on the water that give rise to extraordinary energy in the daylight. The play of light on the lake goes from red in the morning, to yellow at midday, and then a blaze of frenzied red and yellow toward late afternoon, painted in short, ragged strokes, and built up in such a way that they engulf the boat in the foreground of the last panel.

In contrast to the open pastoral setting of the park, the edge of the city is painted as dense architecture, pressing against the park and rising uphill to meet the sky. Rather than static buildings—one of which Carlos actually lived in—the syncopation of light on the sloping roofs and building facades reflects the light at day’s end in a city that is coming alive. When LA itself is the subject, it is typically shown as an animated place; with buildings swaying, sometimes being built up or town down, but always in motion, pulsing with human activity and energy. We see this kind of representation in California Dreamscape, Mural Study (1989), where the viewer is placed at the bottom of the picture looking upward. From either end people enter a place—California as an amalgam of urban landmarks—toward sunset, with curved and swaying architecture in a luminous sky. Overhead two cherubs blow trumpets, as if summoning the City of Angels and all of California to life. 

In thinking about the exhibition, I happened to hear again on the radio the Doors song that personifies LA as a woman. “If they say I never loved you,” Jim Morrison sings, “you know they are a liar.” Carlos Almaraz loved LA and he hated it; he painted both poles and everything in between. Everyone will have their own list of iconic images of Los Angeles—perhaps the gas stations of Ed Ruscha, or the Ocean Park landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn, or maybe the Industrial Parks of Lewis Baltz. Whatever that list, I would add Carlos Almaraz, who created not only indelible images but produced a powerful body of work that changed how we view ourselves and the City of Angels. 

GA Wardle is a writer and independent scholar with a wide range of interests in both art and literary/cultural history who lives in New York. 

Exhibit runs thru March 29 at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills