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Bi-national pop art at Traver

By Dave R. Davison

For Tacoma Weekly
dave@tacomaweekly.com
Published on: June 19, 2008

A garish, Mexican, Days-of-the-Dead aesthetic collides with consumerist pop culture in a post-modern explosion in the collaborative works of Einar and Jamex de la Torre – two artist brothers who stand astride the United States-Mexico border like figures of a new, bi-national culture.

Born in Guadalajara, the de la Torre brothers (sons of a Mexican architect father and a Mexican-American mother) grew up on both sides of the border. Their teen and college years were spent in California. Since the 1980s, they have worked in the medium of glass with which they combine heaping helpings of found objects in a witch’s brew of assemblage.

The de la Torres’ most recent show, “Vitriolic Compliments,” is currently on display at Tacoma’s William Traver Gallery. The show is a collection of more than 20 works – both wall mounted and free standing – that captures the essence of this collaborative duo in the midst of the rising crescendo of their artistic powers.

Sweet and strange, whimsical and eerie, the sculptures of the de la Torre brothers are a riot of wild color cast in fascinating forms. There is the macabre stuff of skulls, knives and dismembered organs side by side with playful elements such as dice, dominos, toy cars and little toy pigs with tiny plastic beer bottles by their sides. There is also a healthy dose of the erotic as well.

Blending the surreal with elements of Mexican folk, these works possess a compelling attraction that is only enhanced by the dominance of glass as the medium of their construction. Were these pieces made of painted wood, say, they would still hold the eye. Glass, however, gives them a supercharged quality. Glass – that peculiar substance that is transparent and yet solid – excites something in the primitive human psyche.

In addition to blown glass figures, skulls, hearts and cacti, the de la Torre brothers freely incorporate mass produced, store bought glassware or ceramics into their work. A piece entitled “Mass Extinction,” for example, incorporates a huge, stemmed punch bowl of blue and white porcelain. Toy eyes are fixed to the bowl and rising up from it is a large, blown-glass heart surrounded by a nimbus of tiny plastic pop and beer bottles.

A number of the pieces pose comically demonic figures atop upturned vessels that have objects or dioramas hermetically sealed inside. The spear-wielding figure in “Killing the Inner Child” stands atop a glass cake that houses a doll of Pee Wee Herman.

The horned figure of “El Pasado” stands atop a glass vessel that houses an arrangement of little plastic pigs seated next to miniature beer cans. They are arranged around a configuration of bright red dominos.

Each piece in “Vitriolic Compliments” is so colorful, so intricate and so cleverly irreverent that it is impossible to make a quick viewing. Each composition demands to be stared at and have its weird and funny secrets revealed.

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