Ray Smith: Unguernica Paintings and Sculptures

McClain Gallery is pleased to present Ray Smith: Unguernica Paintings & Sculptures, the Texas-born artist’s first solo exhibition at McClain and the U.S. debut of a series that he began in the early 2000’s and continues today. Opening Reception Saturday, January 23.  On view January 23 – March 5, 2016.

The keystone work in the series was painted in February 2003 after the controversial decision was made to cover a tapestry of Picasso’s iconic Guernica at the United Nations in New York.

Traditionally, speakers stand in front of the reproduction, however for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address regarding the Iraq War, the background was a sea of navy curtains.

Recognizing the heavy irony in the call for war and the redaction of Picasso’s masterpiece, itself a condemnation of the horrors of war, Smith constructed the series by digitally fragmenting the source imagery, creating what he considers an apt metaphor for a uniquely American, 21st Century distortion.

As Smith describes the piece, “Unguernica is a painting about something falling apart. It’s a metaphor of a time where it’s the un-Guernica or the UN Guernica.”

Drawing from Picasso’s visual language, the Unguernica works — paintings and sculptures collaged and recombined from the symbolism of Guernica — are less about appropriation and more about the back and forth in translation that spontaneously creates different meanings.

Born in Brownsville, TX, and raised in Central Mexico, Smith is no stranger to navigating varied visual and poetic languages and straddling cultures. His inimitable style and subject matter reflects a fluid and hybrid identity, a projection of his bi-cultural American and Mexican heritage.

Using the structure of the parlor game Cadavres Exquises (Exquisite Corpses) to draw improbable figures of varying characteristics, Smith evokes a comedic existential dread. The resulting characters are personal, yet exist in their own no man’s land, floating between one culture and another, one language and another: reflecting a constant flux of translation, leaving them open to interpretation.

The series builds upon an earlier body of work titled Empire that captured the warmongering of the early 2000s and is closely linked to strategies Smith first explored in his Guernimex series from the early 90s, digesting political histories and situations through Picasso’s rich visual language.

In 2013, Smith’s Unguernica paintings were exhibited at Picasso’s childhood home in Málaga, today known as “Casa Natal” Museum.

At McClain, Smith’s work will be shown in tandem with prints of Picasso’s preliminary sketches for his Guernica painting in both an effort to extend the discourse between the two bodies of work and in anticipation of the gallery’s upcoming Fall 2016 Picasso print exhibition.