Review: Luis Cruz Azaceta, Gambit

Excerpt from “Review: Luis Cruz Azaceta and Ivan Navarro” by D. Eric Bookhardt, Gambit

Change happens. That’s not news, but lately the pace seems to be picking up in often perplexing ways. Such is the proposition that propels Luis Cruz Azaceta in his Shifting States expo at Arthur Roger Gallery. As a child, the Havana-born painter escaped Cuba in 1960 with his family. Ensconced in Uptown New Orleans for the past 20 years, his lifelong themes of displacement and alienation are as relevant now as ever. Shifting States is an apt title in an age when revolutions are launched with cell phones and enemies are stalked and assassinated by remote-controlled drones. Blood Line (pictured) suggests a Rorschach blot studded with the oddly similar forms of mosques, minarets, radar and microwave towers in a bristling nimbus of potential mayhem. Surveillance is a maze of circuits attached by electronic umbilical cords to lethal-looking pods in improbable candy colors. All sprout ominous appendages and the effect is unsettling, as if economic, religious and military conflicts had assumed autonomous lives of their own in which mere individuals are all but powerless.

Shifting States
Through Feb. 18, 2012
Arthur Roger Gallery, 434 Julia St., 522-1999