Miguel Trelles’ ongoing painting series, MESOAMERICAN POP, addresses the compelling beauty of figurative pre Columbian drawing and sculpture, combining it with North American pop culture elements from the comic book tradition to formulate a Pan American visual syncretism that is as visually arresting as it is historically encompassing.
In two large format acrylic black and white paintings by Trelles and in various brush and ink drawings,carefully chosen references from the Maya Classic period (including vase paintings and stele) appear alongside characters and within environments borrowed from 50’s and 60’s American science fiction and fantasy comic books and illustration.
In these dynamic new works Trelles applies his connoisseurship of United States pop culture to the comic book, highlighting and honoring the stylistic achievement of such luminaries as Will Eisner, Frank Frazetta and Wally Wood.
Trelles’ Mesoamerican Pop consciously straddles what art historian George Kubler termed “the tremendous potential energy of difference” Europe instilled between the four Americas (Pre-Columbian and Colonial, Anglo American and Spanish American).
In one image Trelles re interprets the figure of Waxaklahun-Ubah-K'awil (Copan) in the role of the Maize God as a cosmic gatekeeper facing a seminal Frazetta “barbarian”. Their lockstep “dance/encounter” is allusive to the encounter between indigenous America and Europe but can be telescoped to an encounter between North America and Latin America. In another images a Frazetta derived buxom princess faces an Eisner/Wood character, visibly uncomfortable as he must remained suited up in order to survive the hostile environment . . . Both works incorporate a young god (Quetzalcoatl?) hiding in the shelter of the dragon/serpent’s throat.
In these two instances as well is in a series of drawings Maya references are telescoped to the present through the dynamism of 20th Century North American pop.
