ART REVIEW (excerpt)
“Unfinished Work for Art: Despite ongoing renovation, the Latino Museum downtown opens
with a Paul Sierra exhibition.”
Los Angeles Times, Thursday, June 11, 1998
By: William Wilson,Times Art Critic

Paul Sierra, the featured artist, was born in Havana in 1944 and emigrated to the United States when he was 17. Based in Chicago and little-known hereabout, he paints in a style combining the bravura brushwork of the Mexican muralists with the subjective angst of German Expressionism. Traditional by vanguard standards, Sierra’s work sets itself apart with personal intensity and a curious sort of illusive, seemingly inner-directed wit. The 30 or so works on view combine theatricality and thoughtfulness into an imagery not unlike the Latino literary genre of Magic Realism.

Most pictures depict archetypal figures in tropical landscape. Often dark with mystery, they’re clearly involved with the elemental as expressed through earth, air, fire and water, all loaded with symbolic import. "Prometheus," for example, shows a nude fire-eater blowing flame in the jungle. "Hi Ho, Hi Ho, Off to Hell We Go" depicts a line of Kafka conformist types marching dutifully while a hyena lurks in the underbrush. Meantime we see a man’s feet in an upper corner carefully inching along tightrope.

Sierra returns several times to the motif of a nude pubescent boy diving into a primal pool. In "Mad Dogs," a man joins the canines howling at the moon.

There’s sometimes a disturbing expressive disconnect in Sierra’s art. His involvement with fundamental nature seems at odds with implied narrative, whose sources are necessarily cultural. Such juxtapositions make more sense set in Sierra’s biblically derived "Judith" because, like the work of painter Eric Fischl, it takes advantage of domestic staging. Sierra’s preferred juxtapositions are somehow vulnerable to curdling into clichés edged with self-congratulatory cuteness.

Happily, the work itself already demonstrates the solution to the problem. It’s the ancient virtue of keeping things simple. A pure, untitled landscape depicting craggy terrain and roiling clouds allows us to concentrate on a really superb painter.

The impression is furthered by two portrait-like frontal paintings of men in dark, jungle-like settings. An untitled image of a burly red-bearded guy and a "Gentleman With Hand on His Breast" are so straightforward they evoke—rather than talk about—what seems to me to be Sierra’s real leitmotif. The idea that, at bottom, humans are still dangerous animals isn’t new—nothing is—but in such pictures Sierra chillingly imparts the feeling

©1998 Los Angeles Times & William Wilson