Cornelia Feye
August 25, 2024
Hugo Crosthwaite was born in Tijuana and still lives in the house he grew up in behind his father’s curio shop. He is known for his fluid graphite and charcoal figurative black and white drawings that sometimes grow to the size of murals. His portrait drawing of Dr. Anthony Fauci was recently included in the National Portrait Gallery.
So, Crosthwaite’s exhibition Tijua Color at Bread & Salt’s main gallery comes as a bit of a shock. Crosthwaite’s life-size paintings are bursting with vibrant colors and hang on normally white walls, now painted in dark red, green, orange, blue and gray. When I asked Crosthwaite why he painted this first color exhibition in thirty years, he explained that he doesn’t have a formal art training—he holds a degree of applied Arts and Sciences from SDSU—and usually draws with pencil and charcoal, because they are easy to use in his sketchbook, which he always carries with him. The sketchbook drawings of Tijuana are the root of all his work. When he was looking for a new sketchbook, he could only find a book with colored pages in the art supply store. Crosthwaite decided to experiment with black ink on colored paper and liked the results. He got large canvasses and covered them with abstract color fields. On top of these swaths of color, he drew his figurative images of Tijuana in his usual drawing technique. The result are the powerful paintings in Tijua Color. The title is a made-up word and a playful adaptation of Techno-Color, which advertised the transition of black and white to color TV.
Taking up an entire orange-colored wall hangs Tijuacolor, the title painting. It features a young man holding a gigantic plate piled high with flimsy houses, looking like the dwellings on the hillsides of Tijuana. Some structured are so light, they fly off the plate, showing the improvised, transitory nature of living many Tijuana inhabitants have adopted. The buildings fly out of the canvas and cover the whole wall behind it. It looks like the houses have proliferated beyond the picture plane and taken over a part of the gallery, just like improvised structures have taken over the outskirts of Tijuana. The extended settlement, drawn in gold outlines on dark orange, has grown into a city. Crosthwaite created the golden background drawings freehand, without outlines or pencil sketches. They grew organically from the artist’s imagination and populated the colored wall. They add an additional layer of meaning to his art and cause the colored paintings to look more three-dimensional.
The theme of a “precarious notion of home”, as Crosthwaite calls it, is also represented in the painting Tortas. A young woman floats in a building that is literally falling apart around her. She’s falling and there is nothing solid or stable to catch her. Crosthwaite is referring to the large population flotante, (the floating population), of people who have lived in TJ for up to thirty years trying to move on to the U.S., dreaming of a better life, surviving day to day in an improvised way, amidst the chaos and violence of the borderland, hoping to move on and therefore never settling down.
Divided identity is depicted in Boletos (ticket booth). It is a surrealist inspired painting making references to the religious tradition of retablos, small tin figures created in gratitude for the healing of a sickness through a miracle of divine intervention. In this case the gratitude is expressed in gold lettered words on the canvas. La doy las devidas gracias a la virgencita binational; (I give my thanks to the virgin of bi-nationality).
Hugo Crosthwaite has a double identity, he is born in Mexico, but his name is English. He is half Mexican, half American, like the divided man on the canvas, whose legs dangle in from above and whose upper body appears on the lower rim of the painting. Crosthwaite considers his identity one or the other, or maybe both. The painting is named after the central ticket booth occupied by a young woman. In order to cross the border, identification is required, a ticket to the North. “Freedom of movement is linked to a piece of paper,” Crosthwaite says.
Despite all the chaos, violence and division, there is good news in La Anunciación, a painting referring back to the religious iconography of Renaissance art. It depicts an angel announcing to Mary that she is pregnant with Jesus. In Crosthwaite’s canvas, the virgin Mary is shown as a young Mexican woman sitting at her stand somewhere in Tijuana trying to sell her wares. A red angel floats overhead. It is not clear if the girl receives her good news from the angel or through her phone. She looks up at the sky, as she holds her phone to her ear. Despite the good news, a dead hand holding a gun emerges from the other end of her cart and emits a blood red drape. “We are living in this moment of extreme violence,” Crosthwaite says, referring to the high murder rate in Tijuana from gun and gang violence. On a more religious level the gun foreshadows the martyrdom of Christ in a modern disguise.
In Cortes (haircut) an androgenous figure is surrounded by signs of a beauty salon, announcing shampoo and other beauty treatments. The figure has golden hair, drawn onto the colored canvas. They hold a rooster, a symbol of masculinity. The rooster also serves as a wig for a skull below. Images explode out from the canvas to the wall beyond and fill it with symbols of femininity, masculinity, religion, violence, dream images, flowers, birds, hearts, flying nopales, winged creatures. It’s an abundance of images that make up people’s identity; how they want to improve their appearance, be their best self, live life the best they can in the short time span they are given. A plethora of impressions, confusing and overabundant, but vibrant and full of live, create beauty out of chaos one moment and one image at a time.
Hugo Crosthwaite’s Tijua Color is an exhibition of powerful paintings, rich in colors, with layers of meaning that ask for not just one but repeated visits.
Hugo Crosthwaite, Tijua Color, Bread & Salt until end of October
1955 Julian Ave, Barrio Logan
Open Tue-Saturday, 11-5 pm
Barrio Art Crawl, 2nd Saturday of the month, 5-8 pm extended hours
