SKY, EARTH & MARIACHI LACHO OVER SAN ANTONIO

Luis Valderas’ “Sky, Earth & Mariachi Lacho Over San Antonio” is part of Valderas ‘El Mariachi Lacho Series’ As an ongoing body of mixed media works, Valderas uses the image of his father, Horacio Sanchez Valderas, dressed in his 1930’s mariachi outfit as an icon and alter ego. Through him, he works to represent the Mexican-American hero navigating modern abstract arrays of socio-political structures and landscapes. Valderas’ compositions present the mundane settings of everyday life that represent the opportunity for him to challenge the perspective of the viewer and temporarily create a landscape. Valderas incorporates additional patterns, design elements, and details of the compositions and narratives are based on Meso-American icons, glyphs, myths and design sensibilities. By hybridizing these images (the already existing surface compositions such as billboards, advertisements, street wall graffiti, train boxcars, the glyph patterns, and the mariachi photo-cutout) he creates a dissonance of reality as well as a new landscape and time frame challenging the viewer to reconsider their position. In this case, El Mariachi Lacho now overlooks what used to be the battlefield of The Alamo like a time traveler