Art review - malaquias montoya at ucdavis
Malaquias Montoya’ paintings displayed at the Nelson Gallery, UC Davis, 2006 served as a visceral and angry denouncement of the futility and cruelty of a society bent on the use of capital punishment as a form of so-called justice.
The viewer is immediately impacted by the strong reoccurring theme of predominantly male portraits often silhouetted or profiled and either in the writhing throws of execution or in contemplation of their own impending doom.
Like the brightly colored hard edged street protest poster of the 60's, Montoya uses primary colors to stencil in words of protest on strong horizontal and vertical banners of color, his subject is usually centered in profile or looking straight at the viewer and rendered in blacks and grey tones, harshly drawn, sketched, in the frantic hurry that feels like the nervous desperation of the last days of these men's lives. Their lives are torn...their sketches are ripped and glued back on the canvas.
His subjects: The rope around a mans neck just as it is tightened with foam spewing out of his mouth, or the spasm and contortion of a full masked hooded figure in the electric chair, the deformed face of the recently executed, or a strong balanced symmetrical figure of a man with arms out-stretched forming a Christ like figure, pedestaled on deep primal blue footing in which injection needles are imprinted in a nice neat row. Montoya wants us to be spectators, or more properly, “to bare witness” at America’s inhumane executions. I have the eerie feeling that by standing in front of his painting I am here to watch the execution, sharing it with just as a few friends, guards, family members and fellow exhibit pilgrims as they might be there beside me, in the gas chambers, the electric chair, the hanging, the injection. That last breath, that hideous contortion. To feel Montoya’s rage at the injustice of capital punishment just look to the structure and movement of the lines in his drawings. Thick dark black, red, fast drawn, angular, heavy-handed frenetic movement.
One of the largest paintings called " The Killing of the Innocent" is an approximately 4 by 4 foot full body sketch of a large man sitting head downcast gloomily. He is rendered in grey-tones, charcoals, acrylics, and pastels. He wears an expression of utter hopelessness, surrounded by the flattened colors of the unfocused vertical grey bars, the yellow brown muted tones of the dreariness of the dulled prison confines. The eye wonders around the painting. There are secondary forms... scraps of newspaper headlines glued on, the flashes of thrown splattered off white paint, torn paper a scrap of the last notes to loved one in poorly written pencil notes, a small portion of a calendar with a date circled in red...the effect is the dirt and grime of the hood...the streets, and the summation of a death row existence and the totality of a mans last days of despair. Through the tinted washed out colors and fragments of notations, and the utterly crumpled figure, Montoya creates a great sadness and melancholy in our minds.
Move from that to a smaller painting, a skeleton dashed off in hard scribbled jagged edges of black and red, the only white in the painting the hi-lights of the teeth to exaggerate the ghoulishness...as Montoya says “a society fed daily on acts of violence, bent on legalizing killing to satisfy our own violent impulses. This also is our America.”
After this show, it is nice to be able to walk out of the building... free... in sunlight, out of the confines of a gallery that just a few minutes prior...brought us into the dark reality of what goes on in another more sequestered haunted edge of our culture. Those images however linger far longer than is comfortable.
