Renato Esquivel
at Perimeter, through August 31
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Esquivel’s pairings set up cultural contradictions that his painterly style tends to lessen or render ambiguous. The largest of the three rectangular images in one Still Life (Esquivel often uses the same title for multiple paintings) has a can of Campbell’s soup sitting next to a traditional vase. In shape and color the soup can immediately clashes with the vase. Later we realize the vase has contradictions within itself–decorative painted bands around the body are derived from pre-Columbian art, but it has a Spanish colonial-style top. This hybrid form suggests the mixed identity of Latin America; it’s not a case of pure tradition versus corrupted modernity because the “traditional” is itself a hybrid–one with a long bloody history.
Typically computers look out of place in traditional interiors, and that’s the case in Library, a diptych in which the right panel shows an elegant, book-lined room with a computer on an ornate table. The computer has been rendered so delicately that it seems to blend in with its surroundings, as if the painter were trying to close the gap between past and present. Esquivel achieves a balance that is a key to his work: he sees differences and similarities across cultures, posing the contradictions as open questions.
A related sense of play is found in Charles Kurre’s 52 collages at Perimeter. Like Esquivel, Kurre combines disparate elements in an almost-celebratory manner. But both artists balance their playful use of materials with an acknowledgement that objects have specific meanings.
