San Antonio interdisciplinary artist Ed Saavedra, a self-proclaimed “45-year overnight success,” will unveil his latest work Thursday, Dec. 5, and Friday, Dec. 6, at FL!GHT, now a stone’s throw from the gallery’s original location in a grain silo across the river.
Blessed and burdened by a restless mind, a thorny wit and a gift of gab that borders on non-denominational sociopolitical glossolalia, Saavedra is a difficult character to pigeonhole. A perpetually disgruntled optimist seems close, at best.
Saavedra has been producing art and text since he was a teenager, co-founding zine The Schertz Mafia with Wendi Kimura in high school. Upon graduating, both Kimura and Saavedra were snapped up by the San Antonio Current as staffers, where he remained for several years, all the while turning his attention to where it best fulfilled his ambitions: visual art.
In those halcyon days, some 25 years ago, Saavedra became a fixture in the San Antonio art scene but remained an insider/outsider — a critical proponent — and this duality fuels and sustains the relevance of his work.
Since day one, there has been nothing frivolous about Saavedra’s creative output. While portraits of an assortment of historical and political figures including Marcus Garvey and Harvey Milk (the San Antonio Museum of Art’s permanent collection) amaze with sheer skill, it’s the artist’s assemblage practice that takes the viewer over a precipice into associative territory — a place where one must have at least remedial knowledge of art, history, politics and historical or current events — in order to process the spectacle.
Take, for example, Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy (1770), which former SAMA curator David S. Rubin described in 2016 on Glasstire.com:
Having had his own confrontations with police officers, Saavedra has become passionately concerned about the treatment of inmates in the Bexar County Jail, where there have been an alarming number of suicides among prisoners there, with four such incidents occurring just last month. But the first of the jailhouse suicides to capture Saavedra’s attention was that of Harlen McVea, who hanged himself with a bed sheet in 2009, after scrawling a suicide note with mustard squeezed from a packet. In response, Saavedra created Requiem for an English Major, an installation exhibited at Blue Star Contemporary in 2011. Consisting of two parts, the installation included Excuse Me While I Disappear (2010), the artist’s painted replication of Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy (1770) with the figure cut out, and 15 Minutes After Lights Out (Bexar County Jail) (2011), the cutout figure mounted on Plexiglas with blue painter’s tape over his eyes and suspended from a bed sheet. As visitors approached the work from a distance, only the opening in the painting was visible at first. At closer range, one could see the hanging figure staged and spotlit in the distant corner like a media spectacle.
True to form, we have no earthly idea what Saavedra is going to present in the new exhibition, titled “I just work here. Ed Saavedra’s Things About Stuff.” And he likes it that way.
For his solo show at Sala Diaz, wet oil paintings were carried in one after the other by careful co-conspirators nearly an hour after opening time. The contents of this exhibition, some 20 years since his first at FL!GHT, is anyone’s guess, but its not one art fans will want to miss.
Free, 6-9 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 5, and Friday, Dec. 6, and by appointment FL!GHT, 112R Blue Star, (210) 872-2586, @flight-gallery, facebook.com/flightSA.
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This article appears in Nov 13-26, 2024.