José Lozano, "House of Mirth"
- Democracy Chain
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
by David S. Rubin
Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, California
Continuing through May 3, 2025
José Lozano commented in a recent gallery talk that, while he is a native Angeleno of Mexican descent, he still hasn’t figured out exactly what it means to be Mexican. Raised in both Los Angeles and the Mexican border town of Juarez, Lozano acknowledges there are acute differences between the two cultures. Southern Californians are considered more liberal and irreverent than the border inhabitants, who tend to be conservative, devoutly Catholic, and bound by the conventions of machismo. So, to better understand the various aspects of his heritage, drawing spontaneously, he creates narrative scenes populated with people inspired by family and friends. He calls them “generic Mexicans.” Stylistically, Lozano’s art owes a debt to Mexican comics and “fotonovelas,” as well as to the graphic works of Reginald Marsh, the Depression era New York artist who documented working class Americans, often seen in crowds gathered in everyday settings such as Coney Island beaches or city streets.
Like Marsh, Lozano is more interested in collective identity than in individual personalities. His depictions of crowds represent the gente, the larger community through which Mexicans feel interconnected. Lozano’s concept of togetherness, however, does not necessarily translate into happiness. In works such as “Tres Volcanes Pari” (2024), “Hiroshima Lounge” (2025), and “El Eden” (2025), men and women appear clustered together, most staring at the viewer with questioning or suspicious eyes, not really interacting. Their gritty expressions, teeth exposed, suggest they are frustrated or cynical, leaving us to ponder the sources of their discontent, which could include the burden of stereotype, which casts them as rapists and drug dealers when they are actually honest, hardworking people.
In a number of charming smaller works, Lozano examines family relationships. “Beach Scene/Mother Son” (2024), depicts a proud demonstration of maternal instinct as a woman lies next to her son protectively while sunbathing.
Macho fathers, however, are viewed less sympathetically. A man seated next to the mother in the beach scene, presumably her husband, looks disgruntled, as if he’d rather be somewhere other than with his family. A father’s failure to support his family is the subject of the otherwise charming “Father Son Story” (2022), due to its resemblance to yellow lined notebook paper with doodles that could have been drawn by a daydreaming highschooler. The composition features a variety of face studies, a mask, and various floral motifs. The story’s reveal is a handwritten phrase at the top, reading: “that man is a fraud, unmask him before he fades into thin air, mom rarely gets an alimony check.”
Fading into thin air actually does occur in another work, one of several timely musings on the current threat to Mexicans and Mexican-Americans alike of deportation. Given such circumstances, the men and women spinning through the air in the background of “Some of the Guests Have Left” (2024) now take on ominous connotations, suggesting those who have been “disappeared” from their everyday environments with no warning and shipped off to a Salvadoran prison. The same can be said of the naked figures lying on the ground, camouflaged among plants in the lower panel of the diptych “Los Body Snatchers” (2024), where Lozano uses a classic science-fiction narrative — a tactic favored by many Latinx artists today — to communicate metaphorically about what it is like to be the “other.”
Lest we not get the point, Lozano addresses the issue more directly in “Gente Sunning as Gazpacho Police Enters” (2024), where the approaching “gazpacho police” (note the pun on ‘Gestapo’) are shown in the background of a composition dominated by the artist’s characteristic beachgoers. Whereas his practice began as an investigation into common characteristics that constitute Mexican identity, Lozano has now shifted to exploring the topic within the context of surviving the cruel, xenophobic policies of Trump and his cronies, while still maintaining a deadpan sense of humor.
David S. Rubin is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, he has held positions at MOCA Cleveland, Phoenix Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and San Antonio Museum of Art. As a writer he has contributed to Art and Cake, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Artweek, ArtScene, Artillery, Fabrik, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, and Visual Art Source. He has published numerous exhibition catalogs, and his curatorial archives are housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
For more information: www.davidsrubin.com.
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