Contributing Artists

Alberto Aguilar, Mel Fumo, David Kaiser, Jorge R. Lucero

Exhibition Statement as Preserved in the SUGS/SITE Archives:

“He is not here; he has risen, just as he said.” Matthew 28:6
“Many of you have come through this gallery door like the two Marys who walked through the entrance to Jesus’ tomb, expecting to see his body. Ans like their story goes, you, too, will not find his body here. Instead, a messenger waits at the tomb site.
The message the angel brought to the visitors some two thousand years ago in Jerusalem is the same mesage which shapes the religious identity of these four Christian painters. Christ was bound to a human body, with all its frailty and imperfections when he lived on earth. But upon his death, he was released from his fragile body, easily broken like a jar of clay. Because of this event, the message from the angel is so powerful to its believers. The transformation of Chist’s body into Spirit explains the lack of traditional, representational Biblical figures within the works of Aguilar, Fumo, Kaiser, and Lucero. So much of Christian art in the past has ben narrowly confined to a slender archive of Biblical narratives despite the freedom of God’s Spirit, bought by expense of Christ’s death. The good news of the angel frees the four Christian artists from painting witha restricting, archaic vocabulary. Rather, these Christian painters create art through a life transformed by God’s Spirit.
Fumo uses a cake decorator to squeeze out caricaturish figures onto brightly colored fields; Kaiser’s delicately drawn flowers are obliterated by patches of latex paint, in the manner of CTA employees who paint over subway graffiti; leaves found in the rural fields of Ox-Bow are transformed into patterns like tablecloth in Lucero’s ‘The—-‘; and Dante’s poetic words in the Inferno are brought to visual life in Aguilar’s series. Looking at the product, the viewer may be hard pressed to find any visual residue of their Christian identity. But what appears as lacking in these galery walls, flood the hearts and minds of these four artists as they paint and moreso, as they have their being. Whether it is through painting or reading Scripture, Kaiser, Lucero, Fumo, and Aguilar seek God daily in all aspects of their lives. Christ’s body no longer lies in his tomb or hands on these gallery walls but his Spirit lives within these four, inspiring them to celebrate their new-found freedom through art.”