Joe & Lucien Alvarado

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EXHIBITION — OCTOBER 9TH, 2021 – NOVEMBER 6TH, 2021

A Delirium of Light and Darkness in Color

The Art of Lucien X. Alvarado

The art of Lucien X. Alvarado (July 5, 1979 - January 27, 2021) reflects the struggle between a joyful and religious spirit and the despair caused by mental and physical afflictions. Lucien ("Luc", to friends and family) was hyperactive from the toddler age on. He was physically gifted, a star soccer player at Riverside High School, and a born risk-taker. He voyaged in the Holy Lands, climbed sheer jungle cliffs in Central America and lived with his native lover in a Brazilian favela. In high school he experienced the beginnings of life-long, debilitating joint pain leading to the use and abuse of drugs and eventually to terminal depression.

Lucien was a prodigious maker of art. In addition to drawing and painting, he played guitar and sax passably and sang for his friends and for students at the public school where he taught English as a Second Language. He beaded necklaces and bracelets. He modified many of his clothes and shoes with his own designs and constructed elaborate altars in his apartments using found objects religious icons, stones, seashells, feathers, foreign money that he constantly accumulated.

Lucien's art is original, yet shares common traits with many naive artists. He was largely self-taught. In high school he took one semester of art, studying at the Milwaukee Art Museum under Mike Broderick, a visual artist and former head of the Art Department at Milwaukee High School of the Arts. He also learned about artistic techniques from his mother, Barbara Kettner, a retired MPS teacher and visual artist. Luc didn't look at art very much. He was unfamiliar with even well-known international styles of art, stating that he feared looking at them would influence him too much. In 2020 at an antique shop he discovered a book on Art Nouveau. "Have you ever heard of this?", he asked me, staring at it, transfixed. He bought the book, and it became a minor influence in his last, intense phase of art-making.

Lucien was deeply religious in a non-conforming way. He prayed for others. He surrounded himself with religious objects -crucifixes, rosaries, images, voodoo and day of the dead icons -which he freely mixed with personal items that had meaning to him, including ceramic, human skulls, knives and bullets. He had numerous tattoos of Gnostic religious symbols, owned audio-recordings of Gnostic scripture, and possessed many dog-eared books on Gnosticism and religious myth filled with underlinings and annotations. This spiritual aspect made its way into his art, explicitly, as in The Hymn of the Pearl (#10), based on an archetypal Gnostic belief in poetic form, or intuitively, as in Pleroma, the image on the exhibition postcard. In Gnosticism "pleroma" refers to the divine fullness. Luc began Pleroma in Broderick's class in 1997, finishing and titling it in 2009, when the work's psychic provenance became clear to him.

Luc overlapped genres freely. A still life of vase with flowers thrusts inextricably into a background landscape (#5). In another (#12) he brackets a vase and flowers with ominous visions a smoking revolver and a skull. In the background a candle burns and pure, yellow light shines through two small windows. There is hope in the light, however dim. His strongest works radiate a tense energy. Many are densely packed with archetypal images crescent moons, spirals, Gnostic religious symbols, the single masted boat buffeted by waves, imaginary creatures and biomorphic shapes including a charming pair that seems part avian, part spy vs. spy (#2 and #15). The color paintings are vibrant, bejeweled with droplets of vivid color. Luc did not prepare a ground for these paintings, which he worked and reworked for days on end in a delirium. When the paint bled through the paper he would waterproof the back with packaging tape or a piece of absorbent paper and continue to add paint, often creating an impasto surface.

Luc is mourned by many. Although he sometimes angered even those closest to him, he was a loving and generous son and friend. Ironically, his personal papers contain drafts of letters he wrote offering helpful advice to friends and loved ones afflicted like him with depression. His funeral, which took place during the height of the Covid pandemic, drew 200 people. Close to $5,000 was donated in his memory to the Riverwest Food Pantry. In summer he was memorialized by a succession of events the planting of a Wisconsin savannah oak just beyond the cairn arch entrance of the Milwaukee Rotary Centennial Arboretum, a celebratory party at the Broderick "compound", a picnic in Gordon Park with a New Orleans-style procession to the memorial tree, a soccer game at Reservoir Park and a swim party on his birthday at the home of a special female friend. This exhibit celebrates the visual art of the force of nature that was Luc Alvarado.

Joseph Alvarado

Special thanks to the JazzGallery for its interest in showing Luc's art, to Deb for help in selecting images for the exhibition and to Sandy and Amy for their help in preparing the works for exhibition.