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Ron Hall Gallery - Dallas
Presents:

-- Julio Larraz
"Visionary Miami artist Julio Larraz transforms the mundane into the metaphysical," writes Deborah Sharp in Southern Accents. He resists discussing his work. "Once the artist tells the story, he becomes a storyteller, not a painter," Larraz says.

Deciphering hidden meanings holds little interest for him; he prefers to let his paintings speak to people. He gives them names not to serve as clues to be unraveled, but to act as mnemonic devices to help him keep track of his pieces. This painting is part of a series about dictators, Larraz's May First which depicts a female dictator, presumably in his native country of Cuba on the May Day holiday. In Communist countries, May Day honors the struggles of the working people. The image here suggests profound hypocrisy.

Edward J. Sullivan, author of Julio Larraz (Hudson Hills Press, 1989) says the painter's symbolism is often subtle -- and his subtleness always his symbol. "That's the magic of his art. You're not quite sure how he does it."

Larraz has kept fans guessing at the meanings of his still lifes and peopled scenes since the first New York showing of his paintings in 1974. "It's always better to get your own ideas from the paintings," he says.

Best known for realism and oil paintings, Larraz has produced a body of work in a variety of media that speaks volumes about who he is and where he is from. His family fled Cuba for the United States in 1961, after Fidel Castro seized power. Like his generation of exiles, larraz longs for the land he was forced to leave. And much of his work is marked by obvious references to a painful past: images of dictators, guns, and other deadly trappings of revolution and a sense that political power, even life, can be captured or extinguished in an instant. An empty room, often with an open window overlooking the sea, is a recurring motif that reflects a sense of displacement, a feeling of watching a waiting -- Larraz's own gaze from Miami southward to Havana.