A dirty handprint on the pristine white wall of an exhibition space is usually something to cover up--not call attention to, but the five-fingered smudge beneath the frame of When Paradise Arrived, the anchoring image in Enrique Chagoya's Borderlandia exhibition at Berkeley Art Museum, was so fitting I had to wonder whether it was intentional. The hand and the tracks of its direct contact with charcoal and paint is a signature symbol in Chagoya's visual lexicon--a riotously idiomatic language in which one super-added sign deserves another. That the print was still there on a subsequent visit a few days later strengthened my suspicions.

When Paradise Arrived, 1988; charcoal and pastel on paper; 80 x 80 in.

The first major retrospective for the Mexico-born, San Francisco-based artist, Borderlandia is a comprehensive survey of the historical records Chagoya revises. Ranging from multi-colored, densely layered maps, codices and cartoons to starkly dichotomous large-scale paintings in red and black, the media Chagoya uses varies widely. His lack of allegiance to a single technique or form mirrors the irreverence of the wholesale cultural appropriation his work explores--a message that is consistently relayed through the use of a hodgepodge of recurring symbols that call historical authorship into question. Figureheads of established Western political, religious and cultural canons--Mickey Mouse, Ronald Regan and Pablo Picasso, stand trial for their roles in the approbation of cultural obliteration.

Chagoya's re-writing of history often hinges on depicting a cultural clash at the moment of collision. In When Paradise Arrived, for example, Mickey Mouse's sooty black outsized hand, fingers poised in mid-flick, dwarfs the figure of a girl whose only defense for the toppling devastation Mickey waits to deliver is the red Kahloesque heart she proffers in return. By freezing the action, Chagoya checks its inevitability and explores the potential for revision. This happens again in Liberty Club #1, in which a car hangs on the face of a cresting wave in a turbulent sea. Referencing the 2004 escape of a group of Cubans to Florida in a 1959 Buick, Chagoya's version of the historically-doomed vessel is still afloat and the viewer is left to ponder the what-ifs.

Liberty Club #1, 2006; Acrylic and water-based oil on canvas; 60 x 80 in.

Chagoya provides new cartographies to guide the lost through his alternative narratives. His maps, however, further scramble the cultural and geographic boundaries of the accepted legends. Road signs in "The Pastoral or Arcadian State, Illegal Alien's Guide to Greater America" direct a motley crew of international immigrants aboard a river barge to various waypoints. One direction offers a choice of destinations: State of Utopia, State of Denial or State of War; the way other leads directly to State of Shock. Chagoya's wry sense of humor is written on the side of a border patrol canoe that guards the shoreline of Arcadian State. Manned by military-clad natives with guns and headdresses, it reads "Part of the charm is the elusiveness of meaning."


Untitled (The Burden of Freedom), 2006; Charcoal and pastel on paper mounted on canvas; 60 x 60 in.

Indeed, it is this cartoonish play with historical narratives that characterizes Chagoya's work. Everywhere, signs, symbols, icons and legends are twisted, defaced and superimposed to reveal their hidden origins. Untitled (The Burden of Freedom) transforms the figures of Christ, Mohammed and Arnold Schwarzenegger into an abhorrent triumvirate ballerina dancing on a stage of blood-red handprints. Shadows and eerie afterimages often float or hang in suspension above their figures. Former California governor, Pete Wilson, minus his head, is a regular character. Bodies, seen skinless or dismembered in cooking pots, allude to rampant cultural cannibalism and the hand, whether used as subject or as tool, is both a humanizing and an active sign of resistance.

Chagoya's codices, non-linear narratives of repossessed and altered symbols printed on gorgeous accordion pleats of amate paper, serve as an important key to the legends and maps of the larger codex of Borderlandia itself. In such a place, a handprint on a wall makes a perfect guide to the half-written and nearly erased histories that Chagoya salvages from obscurity and rewrites for the record. Like his local compatriot, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Chagoya offers viewers passage through Borderlandia with the surety and confidence of a reliable coyote who knows both sides.

Borderlandia will be on view at the Berkeley Art Museum through May 18th, 2008.