SIGHT LINES: 'Drawn In' Features Figurative Works

Robert Pincus, San Diego Union-Tribune
May 14, 2009

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Whether the artist's preferred tool is a pencil, a brush, a camera or something else, vision is what ultimately matters. Style and technical virtuosity are often vital dimensions of an artist's work, too. But it's an artist's capacity for seeing something differently than everyone else that compels us to look long at his or her work.

Two exhibitions at Noel-Baza Fine Art underscore this thought: Drawn In, a show focusing on figurative drawings by artists local and beyond, and Becky Cohen, featuring two sustained series by the Encinitas-based photographer.

Abstraction is mostly absent from the selections in Drawn In. The figure is central.

Marianela de la Hoz, who trained in Mexico but is now living in San Diego, has developed a deserved reputation and following for her exquisitely detailed pictures. There is often the suggestion of a story in her work.

Two women, one looking stern and the other guarded, seem to be in the midst of a conversation in We Will Keep the Secret. The phrase in the title seems as if it might have been lifted from their words. Then again, you may find yourself imagining a different story, when presented with de la Hoz's drawing. Like her other images, it's open-ended, imbued with mystery.

De la Hoz's pictures are small in scale, verging on miniature. Their combination of emotional intensity and otherworldliness is perfectly in keeping with their size. She also has a taste for the grotesque and the fantastical. The scene within Inside the Pan My Head Boils pictures a head, presumably her own. It's floating in some mixture, stirred by large hands. The elegance of the drawing almost makes you forget the jarring nature of the imagery Ð but not quite.

There is a similarly disquieting atmosphere in Hugo Crosthwaite's recent drawings, both large and small. The artist came of age in Tijuana and San Diego, first exhibiting here, and now lives in New York.

A group of small works feature figures surrounded by expanses of white space. They are urban in tone, mixing in flourishes of tagging-style lettering. The people in them appear cobbled together from multiple models or imagined sources; disquietingly, their heads, torsos and limbs don't fit together neatly.

One of the most alluring examples is Untitled (Figures, Boy, Girl in Shadow). The boy's face, immaculately drawn, is positioned next to the girl's, but Crosthwaite makes them appear as if they exist in separate worlds. Her likeness is encased in a darkly shaded box and she looks eerily lifeless, perhaps in a deep sleep.

His biggest drawing, Twins, is arresting, a dazzling demonstration of his ability to render people and architecture. But it is a symbolic allegory about the fragmentation of contemporary America that strains to convey meaning. The parts are better than their sum.

De la Hoz and Crosthwaite were shown together before, in a 2006 show at the Zapf Gallery aptly named Inspiration: Mexico, and there is something parallel about their passion for the grotesque that feels rooted in Catholic iconography.

Two more artists among those in Drawn In help to establish the dominant mood in the show, that of reality shading into surreality. The late Ethel Greene, in the wry Leda and the Swan at the Bide-a-wee Motel, reframes the mythological story as a scene in an ethereal room, with a woman and the swan slumbering in a big bed. Marisol Rendon, also local, turns an open refrigerator into a stark space, mysterious in its emptiness.

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