CLEVELAND, Ohio — The centuries-old medium of oil paint can be incredibly expressive in the right hands. A powerful case in point is the museum-quality solo exhibition on the work of Chicago-based Mexican-American painter Herman Aguirre at Abattoir gallery in Cleveland.
Entitled “Ocultos,’' Spanish for “hidden,’' the show focuses on 14 paintings depicting impromptu memorials, mass graves, or sites of protest related to gang violence in Chicago or drug cartel killings in Mexico.
It’s grim material, to be sure. But Aguirre’s imagery is paradoxically lush, colorful, and highly emotive in ways that engage a viewer’s sympathy and attention. You can’t turn away.
Aguirre’s artistic signature is his fluent use of impasto — the technical term for thick, heavily textured applications of paint — to communicate strong feelings.
By chance, the Aguirre exhibition coincides with a reinstallation of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s contemporary galleries opening Tuesday that includes artists with a similar interest in criminal violence and governmental failure.
Among the works in the museum’s installation is “El manto negro / The black shroud,” 2020, by Mexican Teresa Margolles. It’s a vast wall piece that represents drug war victims in a massive grid of black clay tiles.
Aguirre’s work reaches an emotional register similar to the restrained outrage expressed in the Margolles piece, but in a very different manner.
In his magnificent 2017 painting, “Vivos los queremos!’' “We want them all alive!,’' Aguirre depicts a tattered banner bearing likenesses of 43 trainee teachers who disappeared in the southwestern Mexico state of Guerrero in 2014 and were likely killed by drug gangs according to news reports.
The banner hangs from a pair of gates fronted by massive heaps of rose-colored petals represented by ostentatiously thick dabs of paint. The heaviness of the paint communicates an almost unbearable intensity of feeling, a flood of emotion.
Amazingly, Aguirre, who completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 and 2017, sustains this high register through the crispness of his application of paint which never turns muddy. His emotional pitch, communicated by the robust tactility of his paint, is like the extended climax of an operatic aria.
Aguirre brings the same spirit to “Vamos a darnos una Vuelta al cielo,” “Let’s give heaven a visit,’' 2019, which depicts heaps of children’s clothing discovered at a mass burial site in Veracruz in 2018, an atrocity apparently related to the drug cartel practice of detaining and killing busloads of innocent victims.
In addition to heavy impasto, Aguirre further thickened the surface of the painting by applying scrapings of paint from his palette that curl like flower petals or snippets of ribbons.
Speaking about the subjects of his works in a written statement made available by Abattoir, Aguirre says: “Whether personal or public, these events continue to insert themselves in our conversations, plague our neighborhoods, and leave an irreversible effect on our people.
“As a result, the remnants and memories are present throughout our surroundings, constantly reminding us of the lives taken and the families destroyed.”
Aguirre’s work embodies a fresh take on history painting, interpreted by artists such as Francisco Goya and Edouard Manet from the 19th century forward as the portrayal of current events. Today, we’d call it news.
In etchings and paintings, Goya documented the horrors of the early 19th century Peninsular War, in which Spain, Portugal and England fought the occupation of the Iberian Peninsula by Napoleonic France. Decades later in 1867, Manet documented the grisly execution of Maximilian I, the French-backed Austrian puppet emperor of Mexico.
There’s a resonance of Goya and Manet in Aguirre’s work, plus an obvious nod to the expressionistic and heavily impastoed paintings of the contemporary German-British painter Frank Auerbach.
Aguirre’s stark palette in “Vivos los queremos!’' recalls the inky, expressive blacks used by Manet and Goya. His decorative portrayal of a southwest Chicago sidewalk memorial of Mylar balloons and ribbons also brings to mind the lighter touch of Goya’s early tapestry designs for elite Spanish patrons before the Napoleonic war.
Perhaps the toughest part of Aguirre’s show is a cluster of thickly painted portraits intended to evoke the mutilation of victims by criminals in Mexico.
The eloquence of Aguirre’s handling of thick mounds and scrapings of paint elevates the works above horror and disgust. But is it too much? That’s a question to which the art world and cancel culture have offered no clear answers.
Dana Schutz, the celebrated 2000 graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art, was excoriated over displaying her painting of the corpse of Emmett Till in his coffin in 2017 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Till was the Black 14-year-old murdered and mutilated by white men in Mississippi in 1955 after having been falsely accused of flirting with a white woman who later recanted.
Last June, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland apologized publicly over its cancellation of an exhibit of drawings by Shaun Leonardo depicting police killings of unarmed Black men and boys, including Cleveland’s Tamir Rice. The museum said it wanted to avoid re-traumatizing victims’ families, but Leonardo said he was being censored.
Aguirre and Abattoir aren’t addressing such controversies directly. But Aguirre’s paintings and the title of his show, “Ocultos,” express a desire to be seen and remembered, and to bear witness. That’s an important job for art, and it’s one to which Aguirre brings courage, focus and a clarity of purpose that makes his masterful technique a justifiable means to an impressive artistic end.
What’s up: “Ocultos,’' paintings by Herman Aguirre
Venue: Abattoir gallery