Look Here Upon This Picture, and On This

Abstract

Roberto Chavez: Paintings and Drawings (January 23–February 23, 2013) at Notre Dame de Namur University's Wiegand Gallery in Belmont presented a varied collection of multicultural influences and styles. Chavez's work is impressively universal and compelling and, as such, exhibits many of the ways that the images of the collective unconscious are experienced through personal perception and projection. His subject matter ranges from the delightfully attractive to the horrifically explicit. His styles range from Realism to Surrealism, combining Asian with European with Chicano motifs. The archetypes of the persona, the shadow, and their synthesis in the alchemical process is discussed in terms of Jung's own writings about the philosophical “egg,” a powerful symbol of the wholeness reached through the “detached consciousness” of the individuation process.