“barrioPOP En Vivo y A Todo Color Laredo,” an exhibit of the art of contemporary visual artist Cande Aguilar, opens with a reception at the Laredo Center for the Arts (LC4A) on Friday, Sept. 2, at 6 p.m.
The Brownsville native is a self-taught artist whose distinctive barrioPOP style merges indigenous humor, challenges, sights, and sounds of barrio life with the panoply of popular culture. Beyond the jaunty imagery, there is a gravity and poignancy to his paintings – beyond border culture to the human struggle that informs his work.
Aguilar’s style mixes abstraction with image transfers, local items, and the colors and shapes to form a visual collage. His work widens its lens to encompass the undercurrents of today’s landscapes.
In his early years as a musician, Aguilar toured the country and received numerous awards.
His work has been exhibited at the Guadalupe Arts and Cultural Center in San Antonio. The Cheech Center in Riverside, CA recently acquired one of his works.
Aguilar’s Laredo exhibit is the fifth in the LC4A’s Acquisition Project Exhibition Series by Local and Regional Artists.
“El Puente Nuevo” is the sixth piece in the LC4A’s Acquisition Project, joining the work of César A. Martínez, Ethel Shipton, Ana Laura Hernández, and Éric Avery.
Art historian, curator, and critic Joseph Bravo writes of art and Aguilar: “Everything has meaning by virtue of its context. Likewise, most art is enigmatic when removed from its historical and cultural context.
“It can take a lifetime to master learning to appreciate a single visual language and, like literature, it can require a lifetime of ardent dedication to learn to master the semiotics of multiple visual idioms.
“But if one knows the history of Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Neo-Expressionism, Mexican Arte Popular, Neo-Mexicanism, Nueva Figuración, Chicano art and the emergence of Street art’s Lowbrow aesthetics, then one can recognize the artistic sources that provide context for Cande’s visual idiom. If one is acquainted with the artworks of Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Leonora Carrington, Clyfford Still, Luis Felipe Noé, Willem de Koonig, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mel Casas, and Manuel Miranda then one can appreciate the way in which Aguilar has drawn on the achievements of his predecessors to create his own syncretic aesthetic that is simultaneously aware of historic context and yet uniquely innovative. His artwork has a highbrow intellectual sensibility but also a viscerally lowbrow gestalt which reflects an authentic cultural expression of the inherently syncretic Mestizaje experience along La Frontera.”
The exhibit opening on Friday and Aguilar’s Artist Talk at 4 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 3, are open to the public.
The exhibit closes October 22.
The Laredo Center for the Arts is downtown at 500 San Agustin Avenue. For further information go to laredoartcenter.org or call (956) 725-1715.
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El Puente Nuevo, 2019 cande aguilar #barrioPOP
barrioPOP (3 painting installation) cande aguilar
