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Art imitates art: Series honors family - San Antonio Express-News
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Art imitates art: Series honors family
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By Steve Bennett
Updated 05:43 p.m., Tuesday, June 26, 2012
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San Antonio's Franco Mondini-Ruiz is transforming a large canvas into an homage to "bluebonnet painter" Julian Onderdonk. Photo:
Steve Bennett, San Antonio Express-New s / SA
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In cool contemporary-art circles, bluebonnet paintings
are excoriated as the work of weekend hacks.
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But San Antonio artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz, who is
the epitome of cool with his mixture of high concept
and lowbrow, turns that conceit on its head with his
latest series of works, on view at the Institute of Texan
Cultures through Aug. 31.
"Almost an Onderdonk," the latest exhibition in curator
Arturo Almeida's Texas Contemporary Artists Series,
pays tribute to the first family of Texas painting,
specifically Julian Onderdonk, the early-19th-century
Impressionist known as the "Bluebonnet Painter."
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Onderdonk, whose work hung in the Oval Office
during the presidency of George W. Bush, has become
largely misunderstood as a sort of Thomas Kinkade
painter of "prettiness."
But, as his sister, artist Eleanor Onderdonk, put it: "In many of his canvases, Julian uses
dramatic contrast - blasts of strong volume, with deep rolling orchestration, far removed from
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6/29/12
Art imitates art: Series honors family - San Antonio Express-News
any 'prettiness' which is ascribed by the undiscriminating to my brother's work."
A discriminating artist, Mondini-Ruiz gets it.
His four landscapes in "Almost an Onderdonk" - which include an homage to Porfirio Salinas
(another president's - LBJ's - favorite artist) - are respectful of the man who said, "San Antonio
offers an inexhaustible field for the artist."
Mondini-Ruiz was inspired by a 2008 book, "Julian Onderdonk: American Impressionist"
(Dallas Museum of Art Publications). He picked up the lavishly illustrated coffee-table volume a
couple of years ago in the Witte Museum gift shop while working on what will be his second
book, "Postcards from Home: A Painter's History of San Antonio," the follow-up to 2005's "High
Pink: Tex-Mex Fairy Tales."
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"Y ou may be a bit jaded, just from the context, but I picked up this book, and there are some
very nice reproductions in there," Mondini-Ruiz said recently. "I started to appreciate how
beautiful the paintings were. Some are very sweeping, and they have a nice patina to them.
About a year later - that's how the process works - these paintings began to bubble out."
Onderdonk took his easel straight to the source by painting plein-air, a French term meaning "in
the open air," a practice he learned from his mentor, the American master William Merritt
Chase. Mondini-Ruiz initially fretted over how to approach the work.
"How do you even go about starting a bluebonnet painting?" asks the artist, who grew up in the
Hill Country, home of bluebonnets and wildflowers. "I thought it would be outside my reach,
that it would be this very formal, very Victorian technique that would take me a long time
to learn."
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An instinctual painter, Mondini-Ruiz quit worrying and got to work.
"My paintings are kind of sculptural and willful," the 51-year-old artist says. "I don't know
proper techniques of painting. I will a painting. I'll use my fingernails if I have to. And I do."
Using a big house-painting brush, Mondini-Ruiz layers at least three colors on the canvas - in
the case of the monumental "Love That Landscape," white, orangey red and baby blue - before
grounding it in greenish black and finger-smudging clouds in white. Then, he takes a big,
soaking-wet brush, dips it into blobs of color - red, blue, green, yellow - squirted on a paper plate
and flicks droplets onto the canvas. Voilà! Wildflowers.
"I do it my way, and these paintings practically paint themselves," says the former attorney who
turned to art "because I had to create something meaningful, something beautiful,
something interesting."
He first gained notice in the mid-'90s with "Infinito Botanica," a 1996 Artpace installation that
became an art shop on South Flores and has been re-created by the artist from Los Angeles to
New Y ork.
In 2000, Mondini-Ruiz was selected for the prestigious Whitney Biennial. In 2004, he was
awarded the Rome Prize for a residency at the American Academy in Rome. He has since staged
shows from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to El Museo del Barrio in New Y ork.
"I've known Franco a long time," says Almeida, who manages the University of Texas at San
Antonio's art collection, which now includes two purchases from the "Almost an Onderdonk"
series. "I've seen him grow over the years. He's very focused. He has a good vision. He's
executing it, and now he's very successful."
Mondini-Ruiz, who jokes that he's an "artist better known for sticking diamond rings in
doughnuts and calling it high art," has become a confident, much-in-demand painter.
His work ranges from the "Goya gowns," airy, empty dresses floating on a dark background, to
highly sentimentalized Romantic European landscapes to panoramic views of "Vanishing
Mexico." Onderdonk seems to be a logical step in the process.
"This is my interpretation of the San Antonio that I want people to love and hold onto," he says.
"It's my interpretation of my dream of San Antonio. It's bold and modern, has some humor to it
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6/29/12
Art imitates art: Series honors family - San Antonio Express-News
and hopelessly romanticizes the past."
The irony is that Mondin-Ruiz is being completely unironic.
"The irony of it is that bluebonnets back in Onderdonk's day were considered high art," Almeida
says. "Now, with Franco, they've come full circle."
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