Self-taught painter Darrin Armijo Wardle's style is a culmination of different periods in Spanish art history, especially cubism, Francisco de Goya's political undertones and the subject of bulls.
"Goya's just one of the most incredible artists," Wardle said. "He wasn't overtly political. Everything he did was subtle. His portraits of kings and royal families, Carlos the King of Spain - his subtle gestures about just everything he does is really underneath the surface."
Wardle's oil paintings hang through December at Winning Coffee Co. at 111 Harvard Drive S.E. His starkly lit matadors, bulls, soldiers and civilians seem to pop out of the walls.
The show is a mash-up of new works and pieces he did five years ago while living in San Diego. All his pieces have political connotations commenting on the Isreali-Palestinian conflict, Sept. 11 and the Bush administration. He also paid homage to Goya by repainting part of his famous "The Shootings of May Third, 1808," depicting Spanish submission during the French Revolution. The scene is paired with a bull-masked man in armor holding on to a blond woman.
"I work at a pharmacy, and they've got tons of fashion magazines," he said. "So I just was sort of looking at the images in the magazines, and I found them kind of absurd and weird, only in the respect when you (compare it to) the newspaper."
Wardle comments on the double standards of killing people with his series of soldiers in Middle Eastern territory posed alongside religious figures.
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He did some of the paintings straight from newspaper photos and articles.
"George Bush is our messianic president," Wardle said. "He said God tells him to do things. It's just funny that we have these demands about abortion and gay rights and etcetera, but when Bush says we've killed 30,000 (or) 40,000 - give or take - innocent people in Iraq nonchalantly - we're talking about lives."
The largest painting in the coffee shop, "A Safe September in the Park, Eleven Days In," stretches about eight feet across a small wall. It depicts a bicyclist coming upon a matador wielding a red cloth in the park, and the Twin Towers stand in the upper left-hand corner.
"It was more about innocence and the oncoming impending beat for war," Wardle said. "The bike - the guy's so simple and innocent. And (the matador) just represented anticipation for what was coming. The war drums were beating."
Another large painting, depicting a bullfight, shows realistically animated-looking people in the bullring surrounded by brilliantly painted cubist bulls and a cubist crowd.
"I didn't want to go too realistic, so I took a palette knife and just started smearing and going to town," he said. "I wanted it to be like the crowd was participating. That took a while. That was one of the first bull paintings I ever did, if not the first bull painting. It's definitely an homage to cubism."
