Made in America

“My parents asked me, ‘How can you criticize a country that has given you so many things?’” says Rafael Lopez. “My point is not to criticize the U.S. These things are also going on in Spain. But I’m here now. I think artists should be involved in things going on where they are. And because I speak Spanish, I have access to so many stories. … I’m working with a subject that is very fragile—illegal immigration.”

Lopez’s exhibition Living in “El Norte” is on display at the Truckee Meadows Community College’s Main Art Gallery and credited to Lopez’s artistic nom de plume Blanco de San Roman. The show consists of nine large oil painting portraits of Alma and Ramiro, two young people who first came to this country as illegal immigrants when they were young children. For the purposes of the exhibition, they’re referred to by only their first names. This is partly because, though Ramiro is now a U.S. citizen, Alma is not.

Part of Lopez’s aim is to counteract the dehumanizing way illegal immigrants are often depicted—as statistics or worse, rather than people. Alma and Ramiro are Lopez’s friends, and his portraits depict them in a very sympathetic and even glamorous way.

Lopez is an MFA student at the University of Nevada, Reno. He first came to the U.S. from his native Spain a decade ago to attend Florida Southern College on a tennis scholarship. (In Spain, he says, the options were to either go to college or play tennis—here, he could do both.) He transferred to Saint Mary’s College of California, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in fine arts.

Because he’s a foreigner in this country legally, and a native speaker of Spanish, he has a unique perspective on U.S. immigration debates.

“I stand as an outside viewer in the middle between illegal immigrants trying to find a better life for their family and the American citizens that want to protect their country from danger and criminality,” he writes in an artist’s statement accompanying Living in “El Norte.”

Lopez’s painting style is close to realism—though he’s so focused on the people in his paintings that he acknowledges the realism falters when he paints the landscapes or architecture in the background. And there are stylistic elements, particularly a dramatic high contrast between the light and shadows, an approach he says is inspired by the Italian technique of chiaroscuro.

“A painting with good light will be a good painting,” he says.

His method of painting is labor intensive, requiring layer after layer of paint, and he estimates he spends 250 to 300 hours on each canvas. He usually works on three at a time, alternating among them as layers dry.

“I’m very stubborn,” he says.

The paintings of Alma depict her laughing with her daughters, hiking through a distinctively Nevadan landscape, and, in a striking piece that borders on the melodramatic, holding two flags—one American and one Mexican.

“I love being Mexican, but I love being American also,” says Alma on a recording that accompanies the exhibition. Lengthy voice recordings of both principle subjects play in the gallery on directional speakers, carefully placed to avoid significant audio overlap.

“From my perspective, there’s no us and them,” says Ramiro during his recording. He’s a veteran, and much of his audio recording is spent discussing his experiences in the military. He’s now a college student, and one large canvas depicts him standing in front of UNR’s Frandsen Humanities building, books in hand. Another canvas depicts a scene of Bohemian bonhomie: four young men smoking, drinking and engaged in what appears to be intellectual discussion. One of the young men is Ramiro, another is Lopez, sneaking in a self portrait.

The exhibition is tied together with a quote from Northern Nevada literary luminary Robert Laxalt, which reads, in part, “And the irony of it was that our mothers and fathers were truer Americans than we, because they had forsaken home and family, and gone into the unknown of a new land with only courage and the hands that God gave them, and had given us in our turn the right to be born American.”