ART REVIEW Of mice and men Charles Glaubitz's cosmic, comic imagery lights up 'Los Eternos (The Eternals)'

San Diego UNion Tribune Night and Day section

By Robert L. Pincus ART CRITIC
June 28, 2007
Some artists just have to create an alternate world and even a cosmology to explain the invented universe. Outsider artists like the late Henry Darger led the way in this category. He made thousands of images and also wrote thousands of pages about a world dominated by a fictive war in which his heroines, the Vivian Girls, were often under siege.

The same impulse for historical and cosmic sweep takes a vivid form in “Los Eternos (The Eternals),” Charles Glaubitz's solo exhibition at the Galeria H&H in Tijuana. Some of his “characters” have made appearances in earlier shows: a mutant Mickey Mouse, who resembles a rat as much as a mouse; El Niño Burro, a kind of boy knight in donkey suit; quasi-psychedelic deities; and a race of small beings with pyramidal heads called Quarkies (potential stand-ins for us).
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All of the imagery, consistent with Glaubitz's earlier work, is done with a a jaunty comic sensibility, even when he's focusing on the damage being done to the world by a feverish pace of consumerism. His mouse figure is the chief emblem of this damage. He gets prominent space in a grid of many drawings, and these images are a good place for the viewer to begin. Glaubitz seems to agree, judging by their collective title: “La Fuente (The Source).”

Glaubitz's mouse has become “The Capitalist King” in the first drawing. Writing within the image declares that if he doesn't get what he wants, he starts an embargo or war. (Parallels with contemporary events are clearly intended.)
There is no united narrative. The effect is of a collage of visual vignettes. The Niño Burro is a hero again, sacrificing himself to save nature from the ravages of a society run by the likes of the greedy mouse.

Perusing the drawings, you'll see Glaubitz switches from English to Spanish and back again as you move from panel to panel. This isn't simply some nod toward bilingualism.

Glaubitz himself is genuinely a man of both American and Mexican cultures. He is a native of Tijuana who was born to a Mexican mom and an American dad with German roots; he now lives in Tijuana with his wife and daughter. He got his BFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco and teaches at San Diego City College. He also has exhibited more frequently in the States than in Mexico, and his illustrations have appeared in Rolling Stone and Nickelodeon magazine, among others.

The drawings in “El Fuente” offer some imagery similar to that of his illustrations. Much of the rest of the exhibition, with its focus on gods and Quarkies, creates his absurdist cosmology.
“Deidad 1 (Deity 1)” resembles a Quarkie on stilts, a god created in the image of his worshippers. Most of the deity figures, though, have a different look: faces like tapestries with their features embedded in geometric designs. Each figure is set against a yellow backdrop, as if this universe is more intensely illuminated than ours.

These gods are odd. One is dropping giant fried eggs on the Quarkies below, in “Huevos fritos (Fried Eggs).” Another, a bulging form with winglike appendages and a vaginal orifice, has seemingly spewed brightly colored toy balls across the landscape in “The Soft Machine (“La máquina blanda).”

Everything is rendered with an illustrator's precision and an eccentric visionary's outlook. At moments, you're not sure Glaubitz means to be serious or ironic, but it seems to be part of his purpose to walk a sharp edge between the two.
This ambiguity is consistent. In the installation “Niño indigo (Indigo Child),” a kind of finale, he fills a patio with actual toy balls and flat cloth circles in the same hues. Floating above them is a stuffed cloth blue infant in the Quarkie style. It reads as a Glaubitz-style version of the appearance of a holy child. Perhaps he's arrived to help out El Niño Burro in the effort to save nature and us from our voracious ways, but the story in “Los Eternos” is open-ended.
robert.pincus@uniontrib.com Robert L. Pincus: (619) 293-1831;