Last Friday, I went to an art opening at a surprisingly cool gallery called Sam the Butcher in the affluent, pristine (read: Stepford Wives-snooty) Marin town of Mill Valley. The opening was for an exhibit called "Abattoir: an exploration of meat through painting" featuring a series of acrylics by local artist Sergio A. Lobato.
The pictures here don't do the paintings justice. But up close and personal, I found the art to be sublimely beautiful--a textural and, indeed, sensual delight. They made me look at, er, beef, in a whole new way, by simultaneously elevating its most basic food-source status to that of abstract art, and transcending the visceral to the almost ethereal, in Lobato's use of light and a rich, multi-hued palette that cast a silken glow over the hanging cow parts and dangling organs and bits of flesh.
It's a play on the beauty of ugliness, or the sublimation of the secular, creating art of matter we deem inconsequential at best or repugnant and unwholesme at worst.
Lobato told me during the opening that he'd received many a stank-eye and tsk-tsk from passersby in Mill Valley, even one perturbed woman who declared the paintings "Disgusting!" as he worked to hang them in the gallery. I wasn't too surprised by the poor reaction he received from "progressive, liberal" Marinites, who most likely drove off in their Lexus SUVs with righteous indignation.
In that, I thought the exhibit captured the not-so-subtle dichotomies of life in Marin and its opulent inhabitants perfectly.
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