Heady Vegan Rainbow Murder 10am-5:30pm Mon-Fri; 11am-4pm Sat Through Jul 9 Fl!ght Gallery 1906 S. Flores 872-2586 Turnitoff.tv/ Enrique Martinez: Thus Spoke the Enigma of Desire 10am-5:30pm Mon-Fri; 11am-4pm Sat Through Jul 6 One9zero6 1906 S. Flores 227-5718 1906gallery.com Stevan Zivadinovic: Orson Welles vs. the Burning Dumpster 2-6pm Thu-Sat Through Jun 17 Sala Diaz 517 Stieren 852-4492 or 313-7159 |
Just down the hall at one9zero6, Enrique Martinez puts on the second slam-dunk show in as many months (if you didn't catch him at Sala Diaz in May, you may have seen his work in the Current's May 30 Last Words). His grotesque, feverish graphite and ink drawings create a universe populated by monsters - mutated hairy blobs who live for their addiction to consumption, convenience, and immediate gratification. There is a narrative element involving some cute retro Martians (sporting medieval-esque eye-slit helmets), and plenty of cultural criticism targeting dogma as well as self-absorption (if you liked Heimo Wallner's March UTSA Satellite Show, you'll love what Martinez does with a dick metaphor), but it's too dense and over-populated to reduce easily. The Muppet-like Sesame-Street refugees who cringe below a scene of Mohammed vs. Jesus Armageddon could be victims or passive enablers. The cowboy with a question-mark head astride a giant cyborg caterpillar might be saving earth from the McDonald's scourge, or just another perpetrator of the rape and pillaging. Martinez's attention to intricate, absurdist detail - which reflects and does not suffer by comparison to the artists' inspirations, Hieronymous Bosch and Robert Crumb - will pull you from one alarming scene to the next like a good noir film, so make time for a leisurely visit.
A small, handmade cyanotype book, "Transcendental Shame Over a Burning Dumpster," completes the show's title. It strikes a similar mood with its blue images, but the humor and tragedy of the book's existential crisis pushes it toward the Citizen Kane end of the Welles Self-implosion Meter: In the essay, the Serbian artist confronts conflicting national pride and shame in the form of a burning dumpster across from Belgrade's Nikola Tesla museum. "Over there, all stupidity takes place in my name, like the Original Sin," Zivadinovic writes of the post-Yugoslavia Serbian