At a recent tour of his solo show Battle Cry, René Treviño revealed that one of his inspirations is Andy Warhol. Like the Pop icon, Rene transforms familiar images, celebrates the physical acts of painting and drawing, and makes us deeply aware of the power of an artist’s individual touch. Rene’s show at C. Grimaldis Gallery and the major exhibition of Warhol’s late work on view at the BMA gives us an opportunity to experience firsthand the iconic artist’s work and his enduring impact on our own arts community. (Warhol: The Last Decade, on-view through January 9, will be open for extended evening hours tomorrow Saturday, October 30 during the Warhol Late Night party.)
Andy Warhol. Self-Portrait. 1986. Mugrabi Collection. ©2010 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Rene’s work—always simultaneously beautiful and thought-provoking— tells his personal story through a series of images. These also allude to our shared history and culture. He incorporates everything from manifest destiny and war to Aztec carvings, American photographs, and European sculptures. Each time he appropriates an image, Rene makes it very much his own.
In Self-Portrait, we don’t see Rene, but instead a magnificent black bird, described by the artist as “a power animal” who guides him to the right decisions. The bird is perched beside an Aztec calendar that glows like the sun. When Rene first saw a limestone carving of the Aztec calendar in Mexico City in 2004, he felt as though he had been “punched in the stomach … it was like coming home.” It soon became a familiar icon in his work. A source of wisdom, it connects him to his ancestry.
Each of the works in this exhibition is exquisitely painted or drawn, often on Mylar, and in their presence, you are totally aware of the richness of their surfaces. Take a close look at General Sherman and His Men, where Rene recreated Civil War photographer Matthew Brady’s infamous scene of the general and his associates gathered in an interior. The faces and uniforms of these grim men are captured in bold graphite. Rene has posed them in front of yellow floral wallpaper, drawn delicately with colored pencil.
The back room of the gallery is lined with full length portraits of standing men—among them, a 19th-century general and Indian chief; a 20th-century astronaut and artist; and a 21st-century football star. These men seem to be in conversation with one another. We, the audience, are in their midst—realizing their ambitions, foibles, and anxieties.
Battle Cry remains on view until November 12. And year round you can see the fruits of Rene’s arts-administrator work at School 33. A 2005 graduate of MICA’s Mount Royal School of Art, Rene exemplifies the energy and vision brought to Baltimore by the rising generation of visual artists who are drawn here by opportunities to live, work, and study.
Visit the exhibition at 8 p.m. on November 12, 13, or 14 to see Rebecca’s play on the subject of sexual abuse, DARB TV. Its set fills the back of the main gallery with two television screens embedded into the wall, decorative geometric designs, and a large circular face looming in the corner.
Doreen Bolger is always on the move because she can’t stop seeing, supporting, and writing about the arts in and around Baltimore City. Her lengthy love affair for the arts began in Long Island when her father, an executive in the textile industry, brought home breathtaking fabrics every night from the heart of the garment district. 