Santiago Perez at Carson-Masuoka - Denver

New Mexico-based painter Santiago Perez intermixed three separate bodies of work at Carson-Masuoka Gallery, the new partnership of longtime gallery owner Sandy Carson and Mark Masuoka, former director of MOCA, Denver. One genre is cliched cowboy scenes, another is soft-realism Western landscapes, and the third is an astonishingly complex fantasy world of wizards, dwarfs and heroes that's a stylistic blend of Odd Nerdrum, Hieronymus Bosch and late Philip Guston. All, despite their differences, are intense, painterly, deeply colored oils.

A painting in the first category, The Bronc Rider Started Early, shows a cowboy in a corral lassoing a horse. The dust under his feet is orange, brushy curls of yellow-orange and blue dance in the sunrise sky, and the several horses are deep blue with purple outlines sometimes highlighted in orange. The landscapes present expansive meadows, pine forests or rocky ridgelines; these paintings are seemingly bursting with fresh clean air and anchored by the visual weight of saturated colors.

The largest, and by far the most striking, canvases in the show are the ones Perez calls "magical paintings." These gothic fantasies range from dazzling to disturbing, with an occasional comic undertone that is not entirely consoling. They are packed with war machines, curious creatures and costumes, and a great number of horse heads. In The Horse Race, Part I and Part II, horse skulls that still have eyes are set upright on wheeled platforms that are pulled by ogres and by men wearing "armor" that makes them look like huge amputated feet (their heads emerge from the ankles). On a landscape studded with burning flares and short, sharp triangles, a large-beaked bird, a monkey with a monkey on its back, and a human head in a circus-type animal wagon all move toward the left.

It's all quite surreal. In addition, the scenes seem to conflate Mexican Day of the Dead imagery with Lord of the Rings. Perez, born in Texas and raised in Colorado, comes from a ranching background and is retired from military service, which might explain some of his motifs. But imagination plays a greater role. The Terrible Beauty wears an elk mask with antlers as she cradles an armadillo with wheels instead of paws. Her skirt is decorated with branches and flowers that have come to life and grown outward so that birds perch on them. In The Dream Life, a man in a sphagnum-moss sleeping bag has a lobster on his belly as he rests near a curly-haired boar being ridden by an imp as it pulls a thatch-covered two-wheeled cart past a gleaning peasant woman. Perez seems to illustrate a book of adult fairy tales. I'm not sure I'd want to know the endings.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group