Centro de Artes Gallery at Market Square has opened Dining With Rolando Briseño: a 50-Year Retrospective.
Rolando Briseño calls himself an artist, but he also uses, with a smirk, the title of Cultural Adjuster.
“Texas needs a lot of adjustment. I went to school in New York, and that's when I really started to look at Texas for what it really was,” Briseño said.
Briseño has, through his work, dug deep into history and anthropology, exploring the history of food in the Americas.
“The Aztecs had really advanced a cuisine to a point that was probably more sophisticated than anything going on in Europe,” he said. “So that's when I decided to start looking at ingredients. It just happens to be in that place of the planet where a lot of things grow.”
Necessity and proximity, with a heaping helping of creativity, resulted in what we now call Mexican food, but Briseño's use of food is the nucleus around which Mexican culture revolves.
“Since I was a kid, I wanted to be an artist, my mother sent me to when I was in grade school, to art classes at the Witte. It used to be the only art museum in San Antonio,” Briseño said.
The exhibit’s curator Ruben Cordova notes Briseño’s rearing, and his moving to the other end of the country, gave him perspective.
“It started because he had a kind of traditional upbringing where the family ate food together and conversed, and then he went to college, and he saw all his classmates eating in front of the TV, and he was just kind of shocked that, well, they don't eat at a table? What's what's going on,” Cordova said. “And I think that, in part, sparked an interest in food. So then he became very interested in the history of food and the development of food in the Americas.”
Many of Briseño’s pieces depict tabletops, but each has a kinetic energy about them that makes the elements seem to revolve or pop off the canvas.
“I'm so amazed by that everything's made out of cells and atoms moving and then the the protons and then the quarks, and so everything's in movement all the time, everything. It's a copy of the universe,” he said. “The table, the food, people, are all made out of that those atoms are in constant movement. So I'm trying to incorporate that also.”
Not all of his works are paintings, or table tops. In fact, one is an oversized sculpture of St. Anthony, San Antonio's namesake. At his feet, upside down, is a small Alamo.
“The Alamo was of particular interest to me that it's our history, and it's kind of been a whitewashed. I try to retell the story, and from the Tejano point of view.”
Unlike St. Anthony, he isn’t holding a Bible.
“So instead of the doctrine, I put Truth in History, History in Truth,” he said.
Briseño thinks it’s long past time that Texans grapple with the fact that finding the “good guys” at the Alamo isn’t so simple. The revolving sculpture is meant to underscore that the perspective you see life from determines your view.
“So when he's right side up, the Alamo's upside down. When the Alamo rises up, he's upside down,” Briseño said. “And when you put St. Anthony upside down, you're asking for a favor. So my favor is Truth in History. History in truth. That's all I want.”
Curator Ruben Cordoba said this wide-ranging 78-piece exhibit will be up until Feb. 9.
“I hope people will come and see the show, because there's a very wide variety of work, and I think that he's really, as an artist, one of the most important thinkers that San Antonio has produced,” he said.
Centro de Artes is open every day but Monday and Tuesday, and there is no entry fee.
