A lot can happen at Rolando Briseño’s table, and thanks to his excellent current exhibition in San Antonio, we’re lucky enough to have a seat. Curated by Ruben C. Cordova, Dining with Rolando Briseño: A 50-Year Retrospective surveys the artist’s innovative and engaging output in more than 75 paintings, drawings, lithographs, photographs, public artworks, and sculptures from the late 1960s to today. In Briseño’s expansive opus, the dining table represents culture, connection, and even the cosmos. It’s a place where boxers exchange blows, lovers send signals, and individual ingredients carry global histories.
Installation view of “Dining with Rolando Briseño: A 50-Year Retrospective.” Photo: City of San Antonio/Department of Arts & Culture
Briseño was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1952. The artist’s mother and her family in Mexico instilled in him the importance of mealtime. “I grew up in a traditional Mexican American family where we ate lunch and dinner together every day,” he said on a recent phone call. Later, while studying at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma (UNAM) in Mexico City, Briseño enjoyed elaborate five-course meals with his relatives there. Meanwhile, the artist’s father — a longtime member of the civil rights group the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) — opened Briseño’s political consciousness, fueling his Chicano activism and socially-minded artwork.
A move to New York City to study at Cooper Union in the early 1970s brought culture shock. It was the first time that Briseño lived among people who had a completely different, much more informal relationship with food. The artist was stunned to see “people having cereal for dinner or even standing up or eating in front of the TV.” For Briseño, this other way of eating represented the “hyperindividualism of American culture,” a phenomenon that his paintings would tackle later in his career. After finishing undergraduate degrees in Art History and Painting at the University of Texas at Austin, Briseño returned to New York to complete a master’s at Columbia University. It was another time of clashing identities, as Briseño’s bold and colorful figurative painting forcefully defied the stark Minimalism that ruled the scene at the time.
Installation view of “Dining with Rolando Briseño: A 50-Year Retrospective.” Photo: City of San Antonio/Department of Arts & Culture
“You couldn’t do any representational work. Forget it if you did the figure! Nobody did that,” the artist recalled. When asked about how he managed to persevere with his own work in such a hostile environment, Briseño replied, “If you want to be an artist, you have to listen to yourself, and you have to be honest.” He gathered the courage to keep going on his own in New York during his trips back home to San Antonio, where enamel paintings of food on the walls of local taquerías provided inspiration and encouragement. Despite the odds, Briseño continued to pursue his vision. “How can we not depict ourselves?” he asked. Making the work he did was necessary.
Food was a key part of Briseño’s survival as an artist. He worked tirelessly in New York, producing ambitious, large-scale works full-time. But when he ran low on funds, he recounted that he would stay afloat by hosting dinner parties at his home and studio for potential collectors. “Sometimes I’d look at my bank account and say, “Oh my God, I have to call up the people that said they were interested in buying work and tell them now’s the time to buy!” And that’s how I lived,” he explained. In this way, even when food wasn’t directly a part of his work early on, it was still very much behind its success.
Rolando Briseño “Piri Piri,” 1997, acrylic and chile on African cloth, 16 x 24 inches
In the 1980s, Briseño began to study the history of Mexican food in depth. Works from this period explore how corn, chocolate, tomatoes, chiles, and other staples spread from Mesoamerica to the rest of the world and became cornerstones of other cuisines. “What half the world eats now comes from the Americas,” Briseño noted. However, the artist was troubled by the ways that Mexican food and ingredients have been denigrated as unsophisticated or lacking in mainstream culture and fast food. But the artist didn’t just depict chile, masa, and mole; he used the ingredients themselves as art materials to create groundbreaking paintings and sculptures.
Rolando Briseño, “Chile Mandala,” 1995, ground chile on napkin, 19 x 20 inches
In Chile Mandala (1995), for example, a spiral made of ground chile and mole sauces on a cloth napkin references chiles’ pervasive influence as the source of spice in Indian gastronomy. A similar global transmission takes place in Piri-Piri (1997), which shows a stylized African mask depicted between two heads painted with chile powder that mimics Aztec and Mayan glyphs. Other works use corn tortillas and ground chile to reconstruct buildings that are central to Texan and American identities. MasAlamo (2004) is a crumbling model of the San Antonio monument in masa, while Corn Tortilla Twin Towers (2002) is an unexpectedly poignant memorial to the undocumented Mexican workers who perished in the 2001 attack in New York City.
Rolando Briseño, “Corn Tortilla Twin
Towers,” 2002, corn tortillas, ground
chile and iron, 28 x 16 x 14 inches
Some of the most eye-catching works in the exhibition are the artist’s large still-life paintings. But ‘still life’ seems like the wrong term for these works: in Briseño’s hands, still-life is anything but still. His super-charged, slashing brushstrokes inject an explosive energy into what is typically a genre of quiet inertia. In Natura Viva (1986) — its title is perhaps a play on naturaleza muerta, a Spanish term for still life — a block of tangled limbs is surrounded by fruits that appear ready to launch off the table’s jagged edge. In other pieces, the table is dominated by painted slashes and swirls that emulate the non-stop television static or radio waves. And in some dynamic still lifes, red-gloved boxers join the fray.
Rolando Briseño, “Natura Vida,” 1986, oil on wood, 47 x 42 inches
Briseño’s sparring boxers feel especially relevant in today’s divided political climate, where extreme tensions can turn the act of sharing a meal into a profound struggle. In conversation, the artist remembered having difficult political disagreements during family meals in the past but revealed that his boxers convey conflict around his sexuality, too. “In the old days, being gay was a big no-no,” he said. The shirtless fighting men in these paintings exude an undeniable intensity that blends eroticism with violence, but their faces are also often fixed with a sense of gridlocked exhaustion. As in real life, there are no clear winners in the battles around Briseño’s table.
Rolando Briseño, “Fighting by the Table,” 1983, enamel on wood and
masonite, 96 x 52 inches
A very different world emerges in the artist’s Celestial Tablescapes series from the 2000s. In these intimate digital collages, nude same-sex and male-female couples lay on tables that float among the stars. With their carefully arranged models, fruits, and flowers, the works contain a sense of balance, softness, and sensuality. They signal a shift in Briseño’s approach to the table. Here, the place that the artist refers to as a “secular ceremonial center” takes on mystical and even cosmic proportions.
Many more artworks go unmentioned here. They span other fascinating aspects of Briseño’s varied and prolific life and career. Altogether, this multifaceted exhibition is a fitting tribute to an artist who has redefined so much about art and culture in our time. Dining with Rolando Briseño is like that rarest of multi-course meals: it fills us up enough to nourish us while leaving us curious for just a little more.
Dining with Rolando Briseño: A 50-Year Retrospective will be on view at Centro de Artes in San Antonio, Texas through February 9, 2025. Dessert with Rolando: A Retrospective Annex Exhibition will be on view at Presa House Gallery in San Antonio, Texas through January 22, 2025.
