I STILL LISTEN TO JAZZ. Though this musical form has been so driven to the edges of our culture that I sometimes feel like a fan of Gregorian Chants for doing so. I’m much too young to have known what it was like when jazz was being born and it felt like the heart of the future of America. But if there’s one message I get consistently from jazz it’s that anything is possible.

So I really envy Leo Valledor for growing up in the Fillmore District of San Francisco in the 1940’s and 50’s, where jazz was as alive and kicking as it ever would be – at least until urban “renewal” drove it out in the late 1950’s. Leo had a hard time as a kid, with parents who disappeared and God knows what kinds of racism to deal with. Jazz must have sounded like pure possibility to him. And abstract painting much the same.

We all know that at one time (especially in San Francisco) jazz, abstract expressionism and what’s known as “Beat” poetry were all part of one culture. It may be a cliché now but it was a powerful reality. One thing helped to explain the other: same thoughts, different languages. I can imagine how great Leo must have felt to show his art at the Six Gallery in 1955 (at the age of nineteen), the same year Ginsberg first read his culture-shaking poem, Howl.

Where Leo’s art gets hard for some is right where it ought to get easy. Abandoning the gestural language of abstract expressionism (which would linger on in the Bay Area for decades), he started to explore reduced palettes, geometric shapes, and the spatial dimension of color. This wasn’t the end of his dive into jazz-like spirit, it was the beginning. Geometry was his style and color was his tone.

When he moved to New York City in 1961, Leo found a new milieu, just as invigorating as the one he’d left in San Francisco: the Park Place Group. Named after a gallery that was to become the very first gallery in Soho, and which included like-minded artists Ed Ruda, Mark di Suvero, Peter Forakis, Robert Grosvenor Anthony Magar, Forrest Myers, Tamara Melcher, and Dean Fleming, The Park Place Group was an idiosyncratic bunch whose work, though abstract and geometric, didn’t accord with the prevailing Minimalist ethos of pure form.

Robert Smithson, who showed with Leo at Park Place Gallery in 1966, wrote that same year, “How could artists translate this verbal entropy, that is ‘ha-ha,’ into ‘solid-models’? Some of the Park Place artists seem to be researching this ‘curious’ condition. The order and disorder of the fourth dimension could be set between laughter and crystal-structural, as a device for unlimited speculation.” Smithson believed that what the Park Place artists were depicting with their orderly, abstract forms was laughter.

A different take on Leo’s art, also written in 1966, comes from the great New York School poet, Ted Berrigan: “Leo Valledor magically invokes moods of nature with painting that consists simply of a number of bands of color juxtaposed in a manner that seems intuitively correct. His only ‘trick,’ to zigzag one of the bands, somehow is responsible for all kinds of miracles, conjuring up, in different paintings, sky, a summer afternoon, twilight, blue sea, mist, and everything pellucid.”

Laughter and lucidity. How much better can it get? For reasons of which I’m unaware, Leo left New York and returned to San Francisco in 1968. He continued to live and work here until his death in 1989. As I write this, I’m looking at a page of reproductions of Leo’s paintings from the mid-1980’s: In the AM, Okasian, Hotosho, Fastpassin’. Each one perfect proof that Leo was living in the laughing, pellucid jazz-spirit ‘till the very end.

Echo (1967)

Leo Valledor

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Read Leo Valledor’s son, Rio Valledor’s, ‘Zoot Zoot (A Song for my Father)’

Interview with Carlos Villa of San Francisco Art Institute about Leo Valledor

The greater body of Villa’s art has been an exploration of cultural identity. He freely appropriated and assimilated imagery, traditional materials, and ideas from his own Filipino heritage as he reinvented a cultural vocabulary for Filipino Americans one step removed from the source of such a rich culture. It is the same impetus that moved him to pioneer the study of Filipino and Filipino American art history. Works such as Coat (1979), drew inferences between ceremonial attire, cultural artistry, and the role of a twentieth-century artist-as-shaman in re-presenting an old culture to new generations. Villa furthered this transcultural connection between tradition and artistic reinvention in a series of performance art pieces, such as Ritual (1980), in which the artist absorbed and enacted the essence of cultural shamanism, translating it in to an act of aesthetic experience.

Concurrent with these widely celebrated explorations of heritage and art, Villa was also creating a body of work less culturally identifiable, but no less pertinent to the individual. This work was much more minimal in nature: not minimalist as an adherent of a particular school of art, but minimal as a means of seeking the essence of humanity beneath the over-layering of cultural identity. The aesthetic results are both more challenging to read, and more relevant to the universal experience of being human.

Villa’s installation of works at the Triton Museum of Art consists of a series of finely crafted cabinets, each containing a grid of assembled panels. Their presentation is clean, precise, and, as in all of Villa’s work, laden with conceptions of history, time, relations, and the meaning of cultural identity and human experience. Each cabinet is made of wood and hinged so that its contents can be hidden from view, or open to examination. In this they are akin to a medieval altarpiece or a Joseph Cornell assemblage box. The interior panels, assembled and unified, though still separate, are the treasures contained inside their wooden reliquaries, awaiting the understanding of the viewer, should she or he be desirous of receiving its mysteries.

The panel blocks arranged inside the open book-like cases form a community of interdependent units. In each community there are interplays of lines made from the actual separation and joining of the panels, and lines artificially etched on to their surfaces. As the artist suggests, these lines may represent the delineation of time between events, space between dates, or geographic and cultural separation between people. Yet across these lines flows the inherent grain of the various woods, forming complex patterns of natural similarities that transcend the artificial boundaries of separation. We are left to ponder what kind of wood is used, its color, the presence or absence of applied patina like the external layering of separate cultural identities, and the complexity of grain densities suggesting the deeper core of shared human nature. Human identity, be it individual or as a member of a community, is to the artists, the essence of what matters most. It is this essence that is given visual voice and treasured in its own altarpiece cabinet(s). If Villa’s cultural explorations are a guide for those outside of that particular heritage to understand ‘the Other,’ then this body of work represents the artist’s attempt to help us understand ourselves on a universal level. The assembled panels are a visual metaphor, and Villa is the poet of that vision.

Accompanying this latest work are three series of photographs documenting some of the artist’s earlier universal explorations of humanity through his own minimalist vocabulary. Together with the newer cabinet pieces, they provide a more complete view of Villa’s attempts to portray what he sees as the essence of the human experience.

In addition to an extensive exhibition career, Carlos Villa is a noted historian, activist, and lecturer. He currently teaches art at the San Francisco Art Institute and at the University of San Francisco.

- Preston Fletcher (view article)

Beseeching 3

www.Carlos-Villa.com
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