santos y otros creatures

In the latest group exhibition at the Creativity Explored gallery, Santos y Otros Creatures, curator and CE art instructor Victor Cartagena has assembled work that features saints, demons, and a variety of other figures that fall somewhere in between the holy and the diabolical.  Gordon Shepard's St. Genesius is a looser, more personal take on Renaissance icon paintings, while Rose Gordon's striking monoprint triptych of dancing devils would make Bosch proud.  Many of the artworks in the show are indeed prints thanks to the relatively new printmaking program at Creativity Explored Cartagena introduced a year ago, and I adored the deceptive simplicity of the black-and-white images such as Quintin Rodriguez's Raptagon in which the lines of his fanged beast appear etched in dark marble.  Bertha Otoya is another standout artist (one half of her Serpente diptych is pictured here) as she juxtaposes her critters against backgrounds of her tightly-written script in prints and in one case on a long scroll that unspooled itself from a gilt box across the ceiling of the gallery.  Not only do I always appreciate the work Creativity Explored is doing with developmentally disabled artists but the art they produce is consistently fabulous as well.