John Valadez is widely considered the most
significant artist to have developed a realist pictorial language
recording the Chicano experience in Los Angeles during the ‘70s, ‘80s,
and ‘90s. His work has come to define the iconography of Chicano
identity of the period, situating it within the changing dynamics of the
city rather than nostalgically attempting to reconstruct a mythical and
distant past. His style is derived from street photography as he
records the life of his community and of other inhabitants of downtown
Los Angeles. Yet, his interest in the documentary photographic tradition
is also closely related to the use of this genre by experimental L.A.
artists who, since the 1960s when portable cameras became ubiquitous,
have directed their lenses toward artistic ends. Valadez turned the
ordinary snapshot into a source for his portrayal of a large, diverse
cast of urban inhabitants drawn from his everyday life. Born in Los
Angeles in 1951, Valadez began as a muralist, in which he presented
themes of invisible borders and histories binding together Spanish,
Mexican, and American culture. Valadez’s intense and colorful artworks
express the Chicano experience in a contemporary representational style
infused with elements of magical realism. His virtuoso pastel drawings
present intense contrasts: the formal and narrative interpretations
resemble unlikely photographs that offer social commentary on everyday
urban life.
Santa Ana Condition: John Valadez is the first survey
exhibition of this important Mexican-American artist and muralist, who
has had profound influence on the Chicano art movement in the United
States. This exhibition spans 35 years of Valadez’s photographs,
paintings, pastels, and other works on paper. Santa Ana Condition: John Valadez presents,
for the first time, the development of Valadez’s studio works: from his
early use of documentary and street photography to the influence of
European baroque and rococo painting and sculpture, and finally, to his
more recent amalgamation of photography-based imagery with a spatial and
temporal structure pointing towards Surrealism. The exhibition explores
the specific documentary implications of Valadez’s paintings, pastels,
and drawings of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and their later
evolution into cityscapes imbued with his desire to depict the
nitty-gritty of urban life in L.A. and its ethnic underclass.
Pastels and paintings from the 1990s and 2000s will also be included
in the exhibition. These works, which depart from his earlier strict
adherence to deadpan representation towards a more baroque compositional
structure, are marked by a need to push the boundaries of structure and
style. Memory, desire, intuition, and humor blend in these masterfully
accomplished works on canvas and paper, which are thrust by their very
excess into a territory that materializes a personal iconography beyond
the limits of cultural identity. In his later works, Valadez aims to
make familiar the unfamiliar—whether dreams and fantasies, or the
cultural identity of others.
Santa Ana Condition: John Valadez is organized by the Museum
of Contemporary Art San Diego. Support for the exhibition is made
possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, the LLWW Foundationand
the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Fund. Additional funding
is provided by the Cochrane Exhibition Fund. Related programs are
supported by a grant from The James Irvine Foundation Arts Innovation
Fund. Institutional support for MCASD is provided, in part, by the City
of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.
MCASD La Jolla
700 Prospect Street
La Jolla, CA 92037-4291
