Article for Culturebuzz San Diego: Tribal Pop in Baja: artist Jaime Carbó Marchesini blends ancient with modern Matt Phillips | March 06, 2014 Rosarito Beach, a 30-minute jaunt south by bus from Tijuana, is low-key on a recent weekday morning. Not many tourists this time of year, just a beachside resort town’s melodic awakenings: seabirds angling over the boulevard, motor bikes rattling across bumpy pavement and the regular cadre of dusty, yellow-white taxis trolling for fares. Off Boulevard Benito Juárez, right beside the iconic Rosarito Beach Hotel , is 213 Art Space, Carbó Marchesini’s gallery and studio. Climb the few painted steps to get inside – they’re adorned with words like ‘truth’ and ‘love’ and ‘spirit’ – and you’ll see that he paints on everything. He opens a tin cigarette case – “you want one?” – and leans over his desk to ponder contemporary art. The desk is organized chaos: A bowl full of different colored Sharpies, small jars of acrylics, a paintbrush or two, some sketchbooks and a few green, lucky-bamboo plants. “I needed to develop a visual language which would be representative of this part of the world,” says Carbó Marchesini. “Mexico still, but very influenced by the border with the United States. I was always trying to find a kind of visual expression that would be what I am – Mexican, but with almost a fifty-fifty influence of American culture.” “The Festival” by Jaime Carbó Marchesini was chosen as this year’s poster art for the San Diego Latino Film Festival. image courtesy: Jaime Carbó Marchesini Aldo Santini, who runs Giorgio Santini Fine Art Gallery a few miles south of Rosarito, calls Carbó Marchesini the leading modern pop artist in Baja California. Santini has been showing Carbó Marchesini’s work since 2003 and describes his paintings as “modern pop combined with pre-Spanish ancient Mayan, Aztec [and] Huichol themes and colors.” For Carbó Marchesini, who grew up in the dusty border town of Mexicali and went to grade school across La Frontera in Calexico, the idols of indigenous culture are a visual bridge, a way to connect his ethnic roots with images from the incessant digital revolution. His paintings, with their hard-edged lines and bright colors are, as he calls them, tribal pop. Carbó Marchesini’s teenage years in the ‘80s were infused with Atari, Nintendo and punk bands. But he counts other influences too; artists like Takashi Murakami, who invented the superflat movement, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso and Keith Haring. He sees his work as a cocktail, with semi-equal parts European Modernism, American Pop and Ancient Mexican. “[To] try to make a modern painting which is, to me, new and innovating, without inventing some other art form – it’s like a challenge,” he says. “Brushes. Paint. And see where you can go with four walls.” One of Carbó Marchesini’s paintings was recently selected as the poster design for the San Diego Latino Film Festival (March 13-23). Since 213 Art Space opened almost a year ago, he’s sold around 50 paintings. At 42, his regional success is a culmination of decades of study and work. A working musician in Mexico City during the ‘90s, he started to pursue the visual arts as a profession when his band broke up. Now, he makes his living as a painter. “It was a strange time because I was so into the music that I was trying to make a living out of it,” he says. “And then, when that came apart, I held onto what I’d done since I was a kid which was drawing and painting.” Carbó Marchesini’s work, too, is a response to technology’s increasing relevance in our lives. His paintings are Old World meets new, a crossroads on canvas where the binary assault of digital ones and zeros is beaten back with ancient idols – his is work that defends our intellectual space while acknowledging the receding boundaries of that same space in our lives. “Art used to represent, I think, some of the archetype models in our minds that tended toward spirituality,” he explains. “It’s a register of culture – art. It should be a register of culture, that’s why it needs to be modern too.” *** A few blocks north, across Boulevard Benito Juárez, the staff at Tacos El Yaqui greets Carbó Marchesini with hand-slaps and fist-bumps, a few barrio guys just saying hello to each other. The place is packed for a weekday, Carbó Marchesini says, because it oozes positivity. That, and the world-famous tacos. But positivity is the real ingredient for success. “Your thoughts are seeds and some things will grow out of that. They turn into actions,” he says. “Every art is a communication of culture and mind, and sometimes we forget that all these have effects on our lives and others’ lives.” Soon, Carbó Marchesini’s work and philosophy will make its way to San Diego. A selection of his paintings will be on display at La Onda Arte Latino in Liberty Station from March 10 through mid-April. Andy Gonzalez, who runs the gallery and commissioned Carbó Marchesini to design its logo, says the artist’s work is part of the rich Baja arts scene which has trouble filtering into San Diego and elsewhere. Gonzalez, who has volunteered at the San Diego Latino Film Festival for many years and encouraged Carbó Marchesini to submit his work for the poster, is resolved to bring Baja and other Mexican artwork to San Diego. “People love to see it, but they don’t want to get out of their comfort zone,” says Gonzalez. “We’re going to bring it to you.”
Posted on: Sat, 06 Sep 2014 00:20:22 +0000
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