The Fairest One of All?

“Mirror, Mirror,” an exhibition at Salt Fine Art featuring new paintings from Luis Cornejo and Andriy Halashyn, is certain to do at least one of the following: make you laugh, feel sad or confused, point, stare, and reflect on your priorities. You might also relive childhood memories of Disneyland, Super Mario Brothers, WWII documentaries, playing in the dirt, or drawing bunny ears on serious faces in fashion magazines.

In other words, the paintings do their job—they enthrall your imagination into a rich chaos of emotions and ideas.

Gallery owner Carla Tesak Arzente, born and raised in El Salvador, grew up surrounded by art. Her father was a collector and admirer down to his bones, primarily of art from Latin America. When he died shortly before the gallery opened in 2009, Carla dedicated Salt Fine Art to him.

In naming her gallery, Tesak Arzente found inspiration in the ancient traditions of the salt trade, in light of her belief that art, like salt, enriches lives and therefore deserves a chance to transcend established borders and lines. Staying true to this idea, Salt Fine Art has brought to Laguna Beach works from some of the most promising, noteworthy, and museum-caliber contemporary Latin American artists, often from Central American countries, whose artistic output remains relatively unknown in the States.

“Mirror, Mirror” is no exception, with pieces that reflect a not entirely subtle—although always entertaining and often tongue-in-cheek—criticism of modern society’s obsession with superficial representations of self, mass productions of distractions from the rest of the world, and the accumulating effects of mindless consumption. Both Cornejo and Halashyn explore the point at which reality and beautiful images intersect, overlap, and perhaps even integrate into something new.

Raised in poverty in the gang-riddled town of San Martin, an especially violent part of El Salvador, it’s easy (and not-so-easy) to imagine all the reasons Luis Cornejo has a bone to pick with the superficial trends of contemporary society. When he was a young boy, in the name of his safety, his mother used to lock him inside before going to work for the day. There, closed off from the world, Cornejo taught himself to draw from comic books and cartoons. Today, his paintings are selling all around the world.

Simultaneously boasting elements of rococo and burlesque—fashion models and Nintendo, beautiful faces and rat tails, oil and acrylic—Cornejo’s work reveals a merging of reality and virtual reality, expressive of the ever-morphing identities formed out of the 21st century cyberland experience. You’re taken in by the subject’s beauty, only to discover the subject has a cartoon hand (Untitled 5), Mickey Mouse ears (Untitled 2), or a turtle shell helmet (Untitled 1). Trying to make sense of what you’re seeing, you seek out the borders between the real and the replica, only to discover one inexplicably congealed cartoon-human monster after another. Cornejo’s work turns on its head the fable of the perfect human form, and the insane (and more popular than ever) drive to acquire such a nonexistent thing.

Slapstick borrowings from pop culture mar Cornejo’s gorgeous renderings of models taking themselves seriously. In Untitled 5, a male model is captured in a moment of contemplation, his finger to his chin. At a glance he looks plucked from an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. Only this model’s hand is a cartoon hand from a Disney cartoon. Like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, the human has become part machine (the ever-reproducible Disney machine). And instead of his own hair, strapped around the model’s head and chin is a Yoshi hat, Yoshi being a Super Mario Brothers character.

In effect, the model’s face is positioned inside the mouth of a fictional dinosaur. And, while the two-dimensional cartoon hand is rendered in acrylic, making it the focal point of the piece, Cornejo painted the Yoshi hat in oil like the rest of the model, suggesting an ongoing process of pop-culture’s integration with personal identity (or personal identity’s disintegration into pop-culture).

Whereas the limitations of technology once rendered cartoons and videogames part of a distinctly separate two-dimensional universe, over time, the resolution of the virtual has usurped (for many) direct experience with the real (i.e., the world is a 2D screen). From the video game wallpaper background of Untitled 2 to the empty caption cloud in Tale with Tail to the turtle shell purse in Untitled 3 to the unfinished video game shark in Untitled 1, Cornejo exaggerates how the self becomes decentralized, fragmented by a lack of balance between the digital age and the 3D world.

His work poses the elemental question: “At what cost?” At what point will our dreams be intercepted by commercials and billboards? Cornejo’s work insinuates that we could be putting our energy into creative endeavors which propel evolution, rather than stunt it.

“Mirror, Mirror” expands into criticism of larger societal structures with the hyperrealism of Andriy Halashyn’s dystopian pop dreamscapes.

The Ukraine-born Halashyn has lived in Costa Rica for over 10 years. His paintings reflect a kind of modern dilemma—how long can we keep the show going? And by “show,” I mean modern civilization, in all of its interconnected worldwide forms. His paintings are essentially critiques of the whole thing—blatant, entertaining, and aesthetically pleasing critiques through which time and space collapse.

“The new millenniums announce big planetary disorders, new wars, new catastrophes, new social eventualities, and, with the new millenniums, the need to shape society’s image based on an esthetic and ethic ideal also appear,” says Halashyn on his website. “It is the hope of improvement in a moment when development fails, the tautological reaffirmation to validate utopia as places that can exist.” He isn’t criticizing modern times so much as drawing attention to the coexistence of the haves and have-nots, so as to illuminate our common humanity.

In his “Baby Garbage” series, architecture reminiscent of an ancient empire can be traced in a single painting from its glory days of affluence, to preserved artifacts serving as props for the tourists, to rubble in the hands of children abandoned by generations prior.

Between the aggressive splatters and drips of paint, layers of usually distant periods of time, classes of people, interests and priorities are presented in one masterfully rendered still, where causes, effects, and side effects are shown intermingling rather than categorized and thought of as separate. The wealthy sunbather, the bodybuilder, the model focused solely on her expression, the little girl playing in a hot pink tutu, are all oblivious of their unusually close proximity to scavengers, soldiers, weapons and waste.

Halashyn’s work imitates elements of photojournalism to such an extent that it can be easy to forget these are oil paintings. In Mary Jane Strategy, what appears to be a still from a WWII documentary is interlaced with what looks like an advertisement in Vogue magazine. A Patton-esque commander is poised to lead his men (only men) to wherever he is pointing. Lacking any urgency, one of the troops has his hands in his pockets, and another is sporting an out-of-place (and time) zip-up hoodie. Staring in a slightly different direction as the commander, a beautiful woman in a green dress, stockings, and impossible-to-run-in high-heels, cradles her torso in her arms, her lips slightly parted, her eyes filled with sadness, concern, fear, innocence.

Considering that the woman’s shoes are not Mary Janes, it’s probably not a stretch to view this piece as a commentary on the failed policies behind the Nixon-coined “war on drugs” (even though the Obama administration has stopped using the term, not much has changed policy-wise), which many have viewed as a cover for covert military actions in foreign nations, a huge waste of tax money, and a contributing factor to a permanent underclass (the penalties for drug crimes usually limit opportunities for education, voting rights and future employment).

In Macy’s and Shooting Red Balloons, none of the soldiers appear concerned about where the phallic-shaped canons are aimed. Off to the side, an attractive woman in a red dress is floating, eyebrows slightly raised, toes pointing to the ground. She is either carrying balloons, being carried by balloons, or snatching them from the air. Regardless, she is fulfilling a passive, superficial role in society, with no regard for the violent origins of the mass-produced balloons. One could even say the woman is portrayed as just another balloon—lacking personal identity, unconscious of the canons, just another product of war: a rubbery indifference.

Overall, “Mirror, Mirror” offers viewers a chance to confront their own superficial filters of perception, but not in a nihilistic way. The irony in Cornejo’s video game references, or Halashyn’s use of neon colors and elements of digital photojournalism (or both of their gifts for conveying cluelessness in a face, obliviousness to her or his surroundings) call to the surface a catharsis of laughter and awe.

If, like salt, art is one of the essential building blocks of life and civilization, then one way to a more peaceful, honest, and moral future may lie with remembering to laugh at ourselves, and just how far off-track we have veered as a species. Cornejo and Halashyn’s paintings challenge the viewer not only to laugh, but to think, reflect, progress, and maybe—much like the ancient salt trade—discover new paths, ways, and reasons to enrich the lives of others.

“Mirror, Mirror” at Salt Fine Art, 1492 S. Coast Hwy., Unit 3, 949-715-5554; www.saltfineart.com. Open daily, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Runs through Feb. 28.