Mario Correa

A class of mine from LA Valley college took a trip to Chinatown this past weekend to pop in on some old friends. Our first stop was Mario's studio, where we were greeted by this show-stopping image. Mario has been working on a really interesting series of portraits of figures from strange, esoteric subcultures..like drag racers, hang-gliders...and people who hold odd records in the Guiness Book of World Records. Each portrait is accompanied by an abstract background meant to recall early 20th century abstraction, and to create a linkage between the odd communities that abstraction grew out of while examining the nature of "community" in general. Besides being beautiful works..they do get one thinking about the strange sub-culture that we call "the art-world". The art openings later in the evening kept my mind wandering in this direction..although in the dizzying and chaotic spectacle..there were few answers.But I did feel at the end of the night that despite the arena of competing ambitions and the shared desire to rise from the faceless swarm into glorious notoriety that perhaps we were all authors of this scene..and that ironically, the artist who was being celebrated in each show was not a lone figure on an elevated stage,but perhaps more like a "host" who had merely invited us into his little corner of the world.