Studio Visit

Susana Torruella Leval

I have not seen Luis Cruz Azaceta for four years and approach the door of the new studio, an immense warehouse near the levees of the Mississippi, with excitement and apprehension. I have always deeply admired his work, but his move to New Orleans six years ago has left me largely out of touch.

Walking in, I am dazzled (but not surprised) by the sheer volume of works that fill the vast space. The obsessively prolific quality of Azaceta’s creative energy comes back to me—how he drives himself relentlessly; how, like Picasso, his worst fear is copying himself.

The vitality and energy of the work, and the profuse experimentation with new media is overwhelming. There are three-dimensional collages and assemblages, sequential photographs unfolding within metal studs, metal reliefs that pierce the space in whirls and jags, huge plywood planks with whorling patterns that now supply Azaceta’s preferred background of organic splotches and spatters.

Familiar patterns emerge. The stupendous, baroque energy of Oklahoma 3 recalls earlier rhythms of "apocalyptic pop" (Azaceta’s quote) in pictures like Do not die here from 8am to 6pm, 1978, and The Plague: AIDS Epidemic, 1987. Involuntary Kamikaze brings back the mock-innocent teddy bear imagery of the Bedtime Stories and of the racial barriers and enclosures, both series of the late ’80s. N.O. Security renews the quiet force of the Broken Realities series of l990, providing, in John Yau’s words, the "confrontational evidence of daily life."

Old themes and obsessive concerns— violence, displacement, homelessness, isolation, fragmentation, exile — have found new forms. The violent urban street imagery of the 70’s has shifted to the collective terror of the 90’s—Oklahoma, the World Trade Center, the Unabomber. Earlier distorted or dismembered figures have become endlessly repeating serial images appropriated from films and videos.

The self-portrait continues to thrive. Azaceta is an undisputed contemporary master of the self-portrait, as Hybrid Red Eye attests. Waiting, a photographic self-portrait, touchingly recaptures the sense of expectant impotence of earlier exile imagery. Its pendant, Father and Son, gives his young son a central yet constrained position, surrounded by images of his watchful father. Other memorable images, double portraits with his artist wife Sharon Jacques, offer visual metaphors of ties that bind through love, loss, anxiety, humor.

Months later, what I recall of the studio visit is the seamlessness of the whole, the remarkable continuity of a creative life whose apocalyptic visions preserve compassion at their core.

In May of 1988, I saw Azaceta’s work in a show which contained emblematic works such as No Exit, Man Between Two Holes, El Botecito and Latin American Victims of Dictators. Deeply moved, I scribbled on my gallery brochure then: "an extraordinary show of endpoints— which he keeps pushing farther and farther." A decade later, he continues to push—always farther. There is the integrity of his artistic genius.

New York, August 1998