Joanne Heyler, "Spaciness: The Final Frontier," L.A. Weekly, 1992.

UFOs are a great unofficial American pastime. For proof just cruise by the racks of the Weekly World News at any supermarket counter, or look at television (the latest miniseries about visitors from beyond is titled "Intruders," due out on CBS this spring.

At the Cirrus Gallery downtown - itself something of a UFO since the rest of the L.A. world moved to the West Side en masse years ago - an unlikely exhibition about belief in extraterrestrial life and UFO sightings attempts to unravel all the anxieties, exhilaration, and paranoia that the subject tellingly musters in believers and non-believers alike.

It happens that a lot of artists have made UFO pieces, in as many shapes and colors of aliens and flying saucers as varieties of candies in a Whitman Sampler. Twenty-three works by eighteen mostly L. A.-based artists are on view and. (Cover story image by Raul Guerrero, entitled "U.F.O.L.A" 1973 ) while male artists dominate, many unknowns share walls with Ed Rusha, Jim Shaw, Barbara Bloom and John McCracken.

Christopher Knight, (Excerpt from) "Exploring the Border Experience," Los Angeles Times, Art Review, 14 March 1993.

Some work has a charming, unmistakable sweetness, such as Carmen Lomas Garza's lovely, folkish lithographs of a birthday celebration, a tamale-making party and other family rituals. And Raul Guerrero;s beautifully evocative paintings of prostitutes and urban night life - sort of Toulouse Lautrec in Tijuana - exude a bittersweet aroma.

Robert Pincus, 'Symbolic journeys to places of intrigue," The San Diego Union Tribune, 12 February 1995.

A group is gathered around an elegant dinner table, and from the smoke of their cigarettes rises and apparition of Tina Modotti, a silent-film actress and photographer who spent time in Mexico. A couple, obviously tourists, stare quizzically at a modernist sculpture, but the ancient sculptural figure behind them appears more full of life than they do.

This pair of scenes, simultaneously strange and funny, are characteristic of the paintings in Raul Guerrero's current show at the Linda Moore Gallery in Mission Hills, "Historias y Lejenda de Las Calles de Mexico."

"the right image or icon stills the moment," he said during a recent interview at a Hillcrest coffee shop. "If you can find it, it will stop the viewer in his tracks."

For the last decade, Guerrero, now 49, has been one of the city's most intriguing painters. Collected, both locally and otherwise, have embraced his work, as has The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

In the days before Guerrero took up the brush, his search for icons took the form of installations. In a 1979 show, he employed a Yaqui devil mask, meant for ritual dance, and gave it a new sort of role: He attached it to a motor and made it revolve.

"I wanted to isolate it for symbolic value," Guerrero recalls, revealing the influence of Marcel Duchamp's ready-made's - works for which the pioneering Frenchman used common items, as found or subtly transformed.

Guerrero still speaks admiringly of Duchamp. But he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the installation as an art form in the late 70's and early 80's.

The problem's with installations," he says, "is that they don't affect the design of objects; they're just and assemblage of things."

He wasn't alone. Painting was plentiful in the 80's, after a hallow period that persisted through much of the 70's.

In 1984 Guerrero spent six months in Oaxaca, where he taught himself to paint. A year later, the pictures he produced went on view in Los Angeles - and it was hard to believe he hadn't been painting for a decade. His sense of color was sure; the orchestration of symbolically charged images precise and complex.

Guerrero's style has loosened since the mid-'80s. He likens his current approach to Zen expressionism. " I want the painting to flow the way a Sumi brush painter would work."

Objects, poetry, concepts
Like so many artists of his generation, Guerrero began his career as a conceptual artist. When he graduated from Chouinard Art Institute in 1970, the Los Angeles art scene wa in a transitional phase. The '60s had yielded artists of national and international renown: Edward Kienholz, Robert Irwin, Edward Rusha and British expatriate David Hockney.

The older Rusha was to become - and had remained- an admirer of Guererro's work, but his peers were Jack Goldstein, Allen Ruppersberg and William Wegman, who all moved on to Manhattan and acquired reputations there.

But other influences figured just as early as conceptual art. There was Guerrero's own family history. He had chosen the mask he did because he had Yacqui roots on his mother's side.

Surrealism provided a foundation, too. " I saw what I was doing as an extension of surrealism. I wanted to take into account the dream world, to make objects poetic. This ambition was in the air at Chouinard: we were talking about icons, Jungian archetypes."

Guerrero's mexican heritage made him a rarity among L.A. mainstream artists. Robert Graham is the only comparable figure he can recall.

His grandparents had immigrated to California in the 1890's. The artist was born in Brawley and raised in Blyth and National City.

It was never clear to Guerrero, during his L.A. days, that he would return to San Diego. But when his wife died, he and his son, Quinn, came to San Diego for an extended visit in 1980 -and they stayed.

"I decided I liked it again. It was more of a typical California town then. In a way, it transcended its time, making me think of an earlier, quieter California.:

"It was better to raise my son here," he adds, "and I needed to be away from the art-world pressures."

Recently, he and two other artists established a space, Gallery 3770 Park Boulevard, whish for him is a way of giving something back to the art scene that has been tremendously supportive of him.

"There are terrific artists in this city, and most can't find anywhere to show their work," he explained. so Guerrero, painter Robert Feeley and sculptor Doron Rosenthal are trying to address the problem in a modest way.

Venice, Tijuana, Iowa
Guerrero always felt like something of an outsider in L.A. But then he had always felt marginalizes, at least as far back as high school.

He recalls being struck, at his Sweetwater High assemblies, by how the Mexican students would sit off to the side, refusing to cheer when the football team was being praised.

"It was an expression of alienation," Guerrero recalls. "We were never integrated fully".

Still because of his middle class childhood, he never identified with the increasingly high profile Chicano movement.

"I didn't relate to the Chicano experience of the barrio. I thought my goals would be better pursued as individual artist expression, through the use of modernist aesthetics rather political art. But my objective and that of Chicanos can be compared in many ways. Both redefine the way society looks at people of Mexican heritage."

Guerrero found a from to fit his focus in the interpretation of places, symbolic journeys that frequently invoke the past as well as the present.

His response to Venice (1987-88) took the form of a fragmented tale about the life of an Italian courtesan. Paintings about Tijuana (1988-90) captured the life of its red-light district in portraits and nightclub scenes rich in an air of fantasy. An ambitious sequence about Iowa (1991) looked at the rich lore of symbols and landscapes we associate with the American heartland.

Cultural legacies
The Midwest may appear an incongruous subject for a Southern California of Mexican heritage. yet Guerrero's American roots run deep, too.

"I feel as if Iowa is one of my cultural legacies, too. After all, California was established by Midwesterners, and National City had a partly Midwestern look. so going to Iowa was like going to Spain; it's part of my cultural heritage."

Reflecting on his Iowa series, it occurred to Guerrero that he was exploring, in his phrase, "the mythic dimension of the America's"; his Mexico City series is an extension of that ambition.

But he is already looking beyond it to another series and describes an intriguing painting in which the implicit sexual metaphors of exploration - plunder and possession - will be made surreally literal.

"One will picture a nude woman in her boudoir. It will likely be tightly rendered, more realistic than my recent paintings. Tattooed on her body will be the trek of Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca took through the Southwest."

Valzquez and Delacroix, long admired by Guerrero, will be sources for the style of these pictures. He retains an unshakable faith that painting can embody contemporary issues, too.

"The territory of art, now, is to decipher reality. subject matter is everywhere, Duchamp taught us. To make a picture is a complex as developing plans to send a rocket to the moon. It's about delving into the self and finding the visual language to do it."

Robert Pincus, (Excerpt from) "Retrospectives bring century into focus," The San Diego Union Tribune, December 1998.

"Looking back at 1998, it becomes clear this was a fine year for looking back at the careers of 20th century greats. A 12 month period that provides strong retrospectives for Arthur Dove, Jackson Pollack and Robert Rauschenberg has to be called exceptional."

"In San Diego, there has been a strong run of mid career surveys. the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park is presenting work by the Boston-based, Cuban born photographer Abelardo Morell. In 12 years times, he has shifted subjects several times. His children, old books, maps and rooms have all caught his attention. What unifies his pictures in "Abelardo Morell and the Camera Eye" is the ability to see each in a fantastical way."

"The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego paid tribute to the long-time local Raul Guerrero with a retrospective in its downtown space that charted his three-decade evolution from conceptual artist to painter. His paintings narrate the life of this region as it intersects in Mexican and American cultures. His vision is poetic, not didactic; his gift for finding images that embody the mythic and social dimensions of the region was abundantly on display."

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, "Social Studies, With a Twist, Three different venues present artist Raul Guerrero's work with its historical focus on issues of identity<" Los Angeles Times, July 1998.

Inside a modest bungalow located just a stone's throw from the lush cultural center of Balboa Park, Raul Guerrero paints a mix of fiction and history. Praised by critics and other artists, during his 25-year career Guerrero's has moved from making Conceptual photographs, sculptures and installations to creating paintings that are an investigation of complex heritage issues. But whatever his medium, Guerrero's focus is on issues of identity, narrative and romance.

This month offers a rare opportunity to see Guerrero's work — past and present —at three different venues. Opening this weekend, the downtown location of San Diego's Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting "Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias/Problems and Marvelous Secrets of the Indies." Nearby, a solo show of his current paintings is at the Porter-Troupe Gallery. And at the Santa Monica's Bergamot Station, he is included in the exhibition 'Chairs, Plazas, Vaces, Gardens, Rooms: Paintings by Robert Buris, Raul Guerrero, Thomas Lawson, William Leavitt, and Margaret von Biesen." curated by Leavitt, at the Rosamund Felson Gallery—his first show in the Los Angeles area since 1990.

Guerrero sees history as a form of fiction, and he selected the San Diego museum show's title from a 1591 text by the Spanish explorer and adventurer Juan de Cardenas, a choice that reveals the motivation behind much of the artist's work. Organized by Toby Kamps, the museum's assistant curator, the show includes about 80 paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints and drawings made since 1973.

Although his curriculum vitae lists extensive exhibitions at galleries and museums in California an elsewhere, with dozens of articles written about his work, both Guerrero and his art remain somewhat elusive and hard to characterize. It is as though the 52-year-old's penchant for storytelling has permeated his very being.

Leafing through a stack of canvases leaning against the wall of his living-room studio, Guerrero brings out his copy of Velazquez' famous "Rokeby Venus," depicting the goddess at her mirror. Deciding that the figure's nude hindquarters where vaguely shaped like the northern perimeter of Peru, Guerrero has painted the 16th-century expedition routes of the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro over her white skin.

"She encapsulates those 200 years when the Spanish were at the height of their power and the beginning of their decline, " he explains. Pointing to other paintings that also blend art history with social history and fiction, he adds, "they are like scenarios that relate to the collective history of this continent."

Guerrero regularly travels to remote locations and allows his own observations to mix with ways each place has been represented by other artists or on film.

" I like the idea of going out and exploring." he says. He has made series based on on trips to Venice, Italy, Tijuana and a farm in Iowa.

His trip back from Iowa in 1990 produced another body of work. When Guerrero's car broke down in the Black Hills of North Dakota, he was captivated by the fabled landscape. " I was in the midst of this mythology of cowboys and Indians," Guerrero recalls, "Wild Bill Hickok and Annie Oakley had been there." He painted pictures based on the original observations of other artists who traveled with the INdian tribes or the settlers, observing cavalry charges and buffalo hunts. Loosely copied from the work of Karl Bodmer, Alfred Jacob Miller and George Caitlin, some of there works will be shown at the Porter-Troupe Gallery.

Using the triptych format, Guerrero enlarges his borrowed images to a 20th century, cinematic scale, but he signs them with the names of the original sources. "Its an appropriated image used as a way to literally see that period thorough the eyes of the artists who were there and to whom I could be compared to because they, too, were adventurers traveling around and painting what they saw," guerrero explains of his Western-style images, "They were painting around the 1860s, a time when an indigenous culture still had its pride intact. I feel that I am honoring what has not been honored."