Texas artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz merges high and low culture with fizzy fun in Oklahoma exhibit “Poodles & Pastries”
"Fun on Frosting" by Franco Mondini-Ruiz
From Wednesday’s Life section of The Oklahoman.
Artist merges high and low culture with fizzy fun in “Poodles & Pastries”
Renowned contemporary artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz his opening his new exhibit at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art Wednesday and Thursday with events that will be “Prada boutique meets candy shop meets art gallery meets Mexican peddler’s bakery.”
Influenced by his Italian father and Mexican-American mother, Texas artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz is bringing an exhibit of whimsical paintings and sculptures of Parisian icons to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Although the San Antonio native has created many “fizzy and fun” paintings of elaborate cakes, elegant ladies and well-coiffed dogs for his new exhibit “Poodles & Pastries (and Other Important Matters),” Mondini-Ruiz said he was primarily inspired by a panaderia, or Mexican bakery.
“You can be in the poorest part of my town, and there’ll be Mexican bakeries where everything is pink and Parisian — because of the French influence in Mexico in the 19th century — and delicious and affordable,” he said in a phone interview.
“And rich and poor alike can get their tray and their tongs and buy just bags and bags of delicious, fun, pleasing things. And that is kind of what I try to create in these shows: where no one is left out and everyone gets to participate.”
Mondini-Ruiz’s “Poodles & Pastries” is the fourth installment in the museum’s New Frontiers
"Dog with a Dentist" by Franco Mondini-Ruiz
Series for Contemporary Art, and it’s just the type of unique exhibit museum director Glen Gentele had in mind when he founded the series showcasing “the art of our time.”
“His work merges high and low culture in a way that’s accessible and funny, beautiful, and collectible,” Gentele said. “He’s looking at installing 750 to 1,000 small paintings in the galleries and creating a type of shop atmosphere and using food and music and drinks and people as part of the social sculpture that’s momentary … so if you participate, you will become part of his work of art for that evening.”
For the show, Mondini-Ruiz has created an array of paintings depicting extravagant cupcakes, fashionable ladies and the like, rendered with quick brushstrokes, often on bright pink or blue backgrounds.
“When I’m in another area, I like exploring cultural issues, and usually my instincts are pretty right on. People identify with some of the takes I do on things,” he said.
“So some of them are just so superficial and just eye candy, and some of them are deep. I mean, some of them are called ‘Trail of Tears,’ and some of them deal with ecology. Some of them deal with oil, some of them deal with wealth, most all of them in interesting ways and poignant ways.”
But the overarching theme of Mondini-Ruiz’s work are the differences between high culture and low culture, a fascination that emerged from his unusual family life growing up in Boerne, Texas.
"Doughnut Dior" by Franco Mondini-Ruiz
“I’m always fighting between low-brow and high-brow … because my father was upper class, very well educated and embraced my mother’s culture but didn’t quite understand it completely. And my mother was Tex-Mex and from another class and another world, and I grew up in the white suburbs. So negotiating all those three worlds really affected the way I look at culture. I realized there are good things in all cultures, and that’s kind of what I celebrate in my work,” he said.
“That’s why I had to become an artist: The universe put me in this place dealing with class and culture, and I felt it was duty to explore it artistically and philosophically.”
But Mondini-Ruiz didn’t become an artist right away: He got his law degree and worked for 10 years as a corporate attorney. Although he was well paid, he coveted the creative freedoms his artist friends experienced.
“Being the son of an immigrant and the son a working-class mother, you didn’t say, ‘Oh, you know all that money you scrimped and saved? I’m now going to study basket-weaving.’ I couldn’t do that,” he said. “I became a lawyer, which was the American dream. All of my friends outside of my lawyer world were artists, and I was very, very envious of their lifestyle: getting to travel to Mexico on a whim and getting up at noon and making gorgeous things in the middle of the night. I just had to have that life.”
When he decided to pursue a new life as an artist, he was inspired by the mom-and-pop shop his parents operated. He bought a crumbling old botanica, a store that sold herbal medicines, religious artifacts and Mexican pottery, and started making and selling his artwork there, too.
“It was an environment where people had equality, at a store where we sold things from 5 cents to $5,000,” he said of his parents’ store. “It was a general store, it was a meeting place, it was a (cultural) salon. That’s always what I’ve been trying to create: a place, an oasis, where different classes, different political views, different sexual orientations, they all get along.”
He will bring a similar ambiance and experience to the Oklahoma City museum for the opening of “Poodles & Pastries.” On Wednesday and Thursday evenings, Mondini-Ruiz will be “painting, pontificating, and peddling,” as he sells his artwork right in the galleries against a backdrop of music, complimentary pink drinks and hors d’oeuvres and a frenzy of shopping.
The events will be “Prada boutique meets candy shop meets art gallery meets Mexican peddler’s bakery,” he said.
“I’m gonna have the craziest, most fabulous boutique you’ve ever seen of art,” he said. “There will be people buying 50 of my paintings at a time, they’re so well priced. And there’ll be big, long tables, and people will be curating their own collections. They will be telling their own story using units of my work, so it becomes a very creative, very American, commercialized, frenzied festive evening.
“Everything will be for sale, and I’ll be kind of like P.T. Barnum. It’ll be just a circus.”
On exhibit
“Poodles & Pastries (and Other Important Matters): New Paintings by Franco Mondini-Ruiz”
When: Thursday-Dec. 31.
Where: Oklahoma City Museum of Art, 415 Couch Drive.
Opening event: The artist will be selling his art, painting in the galleries and holding court from at the members preview from 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday and a public party from 5 to 9 p.m. Thursday. The events will include complimentary pink drinks, hors d’oeuvres and music.
Meet the artist: Mondini-Ruiz will be at the museum throughout the day Thursday-Sunday.
Also on view: The exhibit “Faded Elegance: Photographs of Havana by Michael Eastman” Thursday-Dec. 31.
Information: 236-3100 or www.okcmoa.com.
-BAM
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