Artistic journey: Exhibit is visual story of well-known South Texas artist’s evolution

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With “Mi Vida Loco,” Mark Clark takes us on a brief autobiographical tour from his first artistic inspirations to the present. Stepping into the artist’s creative pathway we see his family and friends serving as early inspirations, and life in the Valley combining a passion for social depictions of US-Mexico relations and a rejection of the European art style. His art finally plays with time, moving historical subject matter out of the past and into the present.

“Mi Vida Loco” is currently on display at the McAllen Public Library’s Lobby Gallery.

Spatial concepts within the picture plane create a formal movement that plays a counterpoint to his changing subjects. Shallow depths of negative space against which his objects often float in early works submit to horror-vacui before opening up again after his move to Brownsville.

The earlier works reflect his time in DC where photo-realism ran head-on into hard-edge abstraction. Clark was in art school when the Washington Color School endorsed hard-edged abstraction. But art school mandates can send rebellious students into unexpected directions.

“I preferred things that were a little more real than that,” he commented. He quickly jumped to trompe l’oeil (fool the eye). “Exit (Yellow Dog)” is about his father, a Yellow Dog democrat and ladies’ man who, according to Clark, smoked himself to death. But the consummate skill of his tromp l’oeil technique is at its best in “Motorhead,” in which he describes his misspent youth.

The background space with scattered objects established in “Exit” gives way in a series of paintings about friends and his brother. In “Accident Prone,” a positive-negative space concept emerges along with a brilliant color palette. Here, background images crowd in upon the subject, with the artist’s brother firmly in the center of a shifting non-declarative space.

“I was still in life drawing sessions in an area where there were torn posters all over the place,” explained Clark, “and I could combine these images any way I want, and do Mr. Peanut riding a motorcycle through a brick wall under a lantern with a bucket of paint on his head.”

It became a symbolic portrait of his brother.

“He didn’t do anything but paint,” said Clark. “Once he rode a motorcycle halfway around the block and wrecked it — Mr. Peanuts is one of his iconic images.”

The painting also unleashes sarcasm that resurfaces again in “Moctezuma’s Revenge Pt.2.”

With his move to Brownsville, he eventually discovered Pre-Columbian art and moved away from European based painting.

“There weren’t many people working that side of the street and it gave me a way to honor the ancestors and rebel against western culture,” he stated.

Modernized figures from the Meso-American codices appear in “Elizabeth Street,” and “Moctezuma’s Revenge Pt. 2,” utilizes the early shallow background space with floating subjects horrifying and terrorizing the stateside citizenry. All the scary rumors are here — from a Mayan flutist charming the border fence into dissolution to immigrants taking our jobs to Mickey Mouse roasted on a spit. A superb political statement. Spend some time with this one!

His esthetics ultimately blend into an unlikely marriage between the symbolic shapes of Meso-American deities and vibrantly complex colorations against solid backgrounds. His most recent work, “Night Invasion” depicts a nighttime river crossing, but these are not your flesh and blood immigrants; they’re the deities and beliefs of ancient Mexico — alive with their electromagnetism and ready to land on American soil.

Clark now paints and operates Mi Vida Loco gallery in Corpus Christi.

Mark Clark: ‘Mi Vida Loco’

WHERE: Lobby Gallery, McAllen Public Library, 4001 N. 23rd St., McAllen

WHEN: Through the month of April

HOURS: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 1 to 9 p.m. Sunday