"El cakeito-El cuarto nivel" (2011) by Jamex &

Einar de la Torre. Mixed media triptych: each

panel 60" x 48" x 4". Image courtesy of the

Athenaeum Music & Arts Library.

If you’ve never heard that there is a San Diego Art Prize given annually by the equally unheard of San Diego Visual Arts Network, you are probably not alone. Both the prize and the organization have had little exposure, and the award is usually awarded to a select coterie of mutual acquaintances. Additionally, the Art Prize exhibitions were historically relegated to the lobby of a Downtown hotel.

This year the Art Prize has partnered with the respected Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla to give the Art Prize exhibition a better presence. San Diego Art Prize recipients are invited to recognize an emerging artist to highlight in a combined exhibition. Currently on exhibit at the Athenaeum is the exhibition ho-yeé-tah (joyita/small jewel) featuring mixed media works by 2010 Art Prize winners Jamex & Einar de la Torre and emerging artist Julio Orozco.

There are both new and older artworks on display by the de la Torres, and the new works are an exciting departure from what one is used to seeing by the brothers. Recent works incorporate manipulated photographs in glorious color together with their standard vocabulary of cast resin and blown glass constructions. The fusion of the different processes spawns new work that is complex and quite beautiful.

A superb example is the mixed media work “Superamigos liga justiciera” (2011) (which loosely translates as Righteous League Superfriends). Here, the super amigos are characters from the wrestling world of Lucha Libre. With their colorful costumes, images of various dramatically lit wrestlers have been composited along with a downed weathered tree into a photo of a large lagoon surrounded by forest.

The wrestlers oddly appear to stand on water in a similar way as Christ or the mysterious background nymph in Edouard Manet’s seminal painting “Le dejeuner sur l'herbe” (1863). Affixed to the surface of the work, are several copies of a tiny doll wearing a white ball gown. Each doll has been encased within clear resin faces cast from classical Greek heads. Also attached to the work is a demon headed figure made of glass with the body of a plastic toy wrestler. Without being overly literal, the hyper-colored Luche Libre figures become godlike figures battling one another in this mysterious, heroic world.

Even better is the de la Torres’ large showstopper entitled “El cakeito-El cuarto nivel” (2011), which depicts a pastry lover’s nirvana. A triptych composite photograph includes a graffiti defaced Tara-like bodhisattva flanked by a palindrome of four levels of shelving holding scores of mouthwatering French tarts. Signature de la Torre clear raised resin faces impregnated with representations of coins and resin hands are scattered over the work’s surface. The defaced bodhisattva denotes a corrupted enlightenment and the four levels of pastries allude to the Four Noble Truths that attribute craving as the root cause of suffering. The artwork’s allusions and delectable imagery become an epic quatrain of diabetic lament.

Untitled cinema photos

from the series Salas del

pasado-Proyecciones en

el Futuro (2000-2011)

by Julio Orozco.

C-prints; each photo

29 1/2" x 19". Images

courtesy of the Athenaeum

Music and Arts Library.

To accompany their artwork for this exhibition, the de la Torre brothers selected photographer Julio Orozco who is fascinated by derelict cinemas to contribute work. Unfortunately, Orozco’s photographs and other mixed media artworks included here have a difficult time competing for attention against the de la Torre’s bold and more grotesque works.

Several images from Orozco’s project Historiogramas are included in the exhibit. The pictures are slightly out of focus photographs of comic books pages with a strained depth of field. One may have a difficult time gleaning much of anything from these small, quiet works because they seem to have been stripped from their context.

Orozco’s largest works in the exhibition are silver painted 1970s cinema seats upholstered in vinyl covered black and white photos of cinema interiors. Vinyl cutout images of people also paste the floor. The seats and cutouts are a part of his project titled Salas del Pasado-Proyeccione en el Futuro (roughly translated as Venues of the past-projection into the future), which he has been working on since 2000. Another component of the project consists of a series of documentary style photographs capturing Art Deco cinema entrances in various states of repair, but the cold, inelegant style of the photographs makes a viewer long to view the actual theaters instead. Again, not being able to view the entire project hampers its appreciation.

To be fair, the de la Torre brothers’ style is in your face bold and fantastic, and Orozco’s style is more sedate and cerebral. Unfortunately, in this setting Julio Orozco’s artworks at best can be described as innocuous work that a viewer might bump into while trying to better see the commanding artworks by brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre.