Artist Lecture No. 2 - Jose Manuel Alfaro

I attended the graduate thesis lecture by Jose Manuel Alfaro on the 3^rd of May, 2012 and attended his thesis show.  The show and lecture were titled “Death, Drugs and La Linea”. 

                Manuel identifies as a Chicano political artist, and is influenced by the first wave of Chicano art from the 60’s and 70’s, as well as by the Mexican muralists of the 20’s and 30’s and Aztec art.  He works with large canvases, murals, and sculptures.  His work concerns the death and violence that surrounds the culture of the Mexican cartels, and the effect of the border (La Linea, or “the line”) and both Mexican and American politics on the narco culture.  He relates the glorification of death that exists in the cartels to a similar glorification of death that existed in the Aztec culture of human sacrifice and blood rites.  The paintings themselves are influenced by pop art and surrealism, as well as 60’s Chicano work and Aztec symbols.

                Manuel’s show consisted of a few large canvases and one sculpture.  I felt that his work did convey the sense of violence and hopelessness that exists along the Mexican-American border.  For me, the most striking images were two paintings that mirrored each other- one was of an American UAV (Unmanned Arial Vehicle) used to patrol the border, and the other was of a simple catapult constructed by a cartel to throw packets of drugs over the border.  The difference in technology was striking, and both were very well rendered in very bold colors and lines.  It really questioned how the cartels could ostensibly be winning the “War on Drugs” with such a huge gap in technology, and what that says about the seemingly endless violence of that “war”.  I also enjoyed the sculpture, a cartoon skull made of layers of wooden boards.