William Wilson and Henry J. Seldis,(Excerpt from) "A Critical Guide to the Galleries," Los Angeles Times, 8 Mar.1974.

Wilshire District: 'Equally on view are a series of irritatingly hip works by debuting local Raul Guerrero. They include a large fabric pyramid hanging upside-down from the ceiling, a primitive mask that spins and rubber tubes that whistle. Whether satirical or serious about concept art and "Secrets of the Great Pyramids," they add little to existing perception.

Thomas Albright, (Excerpt from) "Bloodless and Insipid Works," San Francisco Chronicle, 8 Dec. 1977.

"Los Angeles," a group organized by Bay Area artist David McKenzie and currently on view at the San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut Street, may or may not provide a fair representation of what's happening among artists in Southern California.

Raul Guerrero, in the mezzanine gallery, is displaying a potpourri of things that include three non-distinctive color photographs and a Yaqui mask that rotates when you step on an electric activator; but he is also showing a witty video piece, "Vuelo Mundial," that consists of the unchanging image of a large Pan Am airplane below where the names of various world capitals appear and fade, while the drone of airplace engines sounds over the speaker.

He goes off in another direction in "DNA," a handsome, somewhat evocative installation piece in which sheets of carbon paper are neatly arranged on the floor to form a square, over which a spiral of fine dust thickens toward the center to a peak that rises to meet the tip of an empty vessel suspended from the ceiling.

William Wilson, (Excerpt from) "A Critical Guide to the Galleries," Los Angeles Times, 17 March 1978.

Raul Guerrero's offbeat photography , sculpture, video and writings have about the right degree of obscurity to establish him as a cult figure. He puts us in mind of Wallace Berman, but Guerrero's is a gentler art, without social conscience.

A mixed bag of work, in two consecutive shows, is laced with humor, nostalgia and mysticism. Such diversity is confusing, but Guerrero's visionary sense and primitive methods look promising.

The first show, through Saturday, features well-composed geometric photograms and an electric kaleidoscope that turns crystals into colorless organic patterns. A draped body casting of the artist, floating horizontally, maintains a ghostly vigil in the back room.

The second show, beginning Tuesday, includes evocative photographs of beachside activity taken with a camera obscura. Additional drawings were not seen by your reviewer. Guerrero's videotapes will be aired March 25. A meandering collection of his writings is available.

James Welling, (Excerpt from) "Raul Guerrero's Installations, Photographs, Writings," ARTWEEK, 11 March 1978.

The two installations by Raul Guerrero at the Thomas Lewallen Gallery this month are both dated 1973. Topografia and Cristales reflect the relative timelessness of the artist's production as well as indicating a highly diversified body of work.

Topografia, in the sky lit gallery space in back, is a body cast of the artist which is covered with a gray sheet. It floats in the room, ominously funereal. The folds of the sheet describe the shape of the body underneath as lines of longitude and latitude, hence the title. Guerrero has never worked in performance. Topografia is a performance work in absence The document is the real thing. This corpse or sleeping figure theme is contemporary with other "dead man" pieces by Chris Burden and Jack Goldstein five years ago.

The adjacent gallery contains Cristales, a motorized kaleidoscope. You peer through a tiny hole at one end of this plexiglass and wire construction to look at slowly revolving gray and blue crystals in an eight-sided mirrorized chamber. The piece is hypnotic, simple and direct. In context with the sleeping figure next door, this becomes the figure's dream - a mechanized vision of elements coalescing and decaying like a primitive film loop.

On the walls in this gallery is a suite of related photographic works, untitled circle, square and triangle photograms from 1976. To make these cameraless images, Guerrero placed, somewhat randomly, opaque shapes on photographic paper. Like the kaleidoscope object which is distinguished by its directness, the photographic compositions are essential photographs.

For the second half of the exhibition, beginning March 21 and ending April 1, the installation pieces will be replaced by new photographs made with a camera obscura. The relative levels of isolation and abstraction of the 1973 works, the weakest aspects of the pieces, are transformed in the new group. Using a public camera obscura on the Santa Monica Palisades overlooking the ocean, Guerrero exposed large sheets of photographic paper to produce negative images of the space surrounding the camera. What we see are Seurat-like perspectives, foliage, paths, cars, people sunbathing, playing shuffleboard, jogging in unearthly brown, blue and black.

This group of pictures unifies Guerrero's major aspirations. First the pictures are accessible; they depict everyday objects and situations. Second, like the photograms, the reinvent photography. Third, randomness and abstraction are important compositional elements. Unlike Topografia and Cristales, these functions are not in the service of minimalism, but operate within a social framework. fourth, the works express a visionary felling which the best of Guerrero's objects and photographs tap into.

On March 25 the gallery will present four videotapes by Guerrero: Nude, Vuelo Mundial, Circle Square Triangle and an untitled work. Finally, a selection of the artist's writings will be published in context with the exhibition. I saw parts of the publication in progress, and the writing, show works of fiction, is very good, possibly the best work in the show.

Kathy Zimmerer, (Excerpt from) "Mathematics and Narratives by Los Angeles Artists", ARTWEEK, 7 Jan. 1978.

Guerrero exhibits a plaster-of-paris bust of Beethoven which he had "flocked with bright orange sand. The object is kitsch, vulgar, confusing. Together with this object he shows a triptych of three black and white photographs of the bust, taken with a homemade, pinhole camera. The resulting images are ghostly, difficult to discern, like so-called spirit photographs. A fourth photograph in color, a clear precise print, is equally bizarre. Somehow the glossy, slick reproduction of a ridiculous object tends it an air of credibility that is completely consistent with its actual material presence. The photographer Metzler in the second gallery has chosen images that relate with wry wit to Guerrero's.