Art Out on the Town

Another gallery of sorts is uncovered at Casa Panza, a well-known local Spanish eatery, which is all the more pleasant because of its air conditioning. Owner José Lopez admits he is a novice. "I know nothing about art, but I want to help the artists and the neighborhood with a meeting place," he remarks. Tavern art, of course, has a long history; restaurants, bars, and clubs can be good vehicles to bring art to the public. Still, nurturing a creative location takes time and patience. Aside from a few drawings, the art here needs a facelift. Most paintings were derivatively sophomoric, making it clear the active AC was indeed the main attraction. "Give these people the most rancid conceptual art, and I bet they would love it," says Diaz de Villegas, in his biting commentary. "People are thirsty here," says Vivian Martell from lab6, referring not to the crowd's physical desires but its cultural ones. She knows. José Reyes's orange-color window installation, "Living a Better Life," in which Reyes lived, dressed in an orange suit, for three days, attracted the attention of the whole neighborhood to lab6. "You don't see this response in Little Havana, at least not over art," declares Gaby Meszaros, a Hungarian artist. "Perhaps they've never had a chance, beyond the once-a-year predictable carnival escape," adds Rafael Fornes, an architecture theorist.

Regardless of the merits of some of the art, one thing is clear this evening: People are having fun -- true, spontaneous fun. There is a legitimate desire by merchants, artists, and the public to make things happen. Fornes sums it up: "This is Calle Ocho post-Elian, a promise for better things to come."

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From Calle Ocho to the Gables that same Friday night, two other exhibitions rocked the town. Broman Fine Art showed Perceptions (Percepciones), curated by Manola Payares, highlighting artists Maria Brito, Lilian Cuenca and Carolina Sardi. "Perceptions" sets the tone for a contemporary line of work Manola Payares wants to bring to the Gables, with toil and patience. The work is dark, but it pays off. Lilian Cuenca works in a kind of neosymbolism, with influences from Böcklin to von Stuck. Her semiabstract images take on the spirit of the movement, not the nostalgia. The brushwork is ponderously liquid, with big washes of light and shadow. She's convincing with these decadent quasi abstractions, hinting at a paragon beyond the mundane. For some time now Maria Brito's iconography has explored the tortures of the modern soul. Her powerful installations/paintings explore a kind of surreal realism in which she invites us to confront our own beasts. Brito produces unique assemblages where traumatic memories dwell amid bizarre chambers with duct-filled furniture for human exudation. Carolina Sardi's sculptures express the negation, or rather the deferral, of solidity: She reduces volume and turns content into fluid motion. Some of the pieces evoke self-inflicted pain and muted aggressiveness. Her later work, though, has moved out from darkness to a lighter, offbeat neominimalism, where less is better.

From Gables to off-Gables, Manscape, by photographer Alexis Rodriguez-Duarte, opened at José Alonso Fine Arts. Rodriguez-Duarte naturalizes the male penis very much the way Ansel Adams eroticized nature: The gonad metamorphosizes from rocket to flower to elephant's trunk to Lilliputian. He manages to present an aesthetic, humanistic view of a difficult and overrated subject. Yet for an exhibition that proposes to portray the male landscape broadly, the show includes only the genitalia of Caucasian men. That said, José Alonso's gesture in presenting this work is still quite daring for our sometimes conceptually provincial Miami.