[music]
- The best art criticism comes from the proper perspective.
- These were the issue.
We were talking about that the flags were not -- they work but they don't work.
- You need to understand where the artist is coming from,
but you can't be so close you don't see the flaws. Rafael Francisco Salas understands that.
- I sit in this chair and I'm just sort of staring at the work and trying to imagine myself as a viewer who's never looked at
- As an art professor at Ripon College and an art critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
he knows criticism is a part of the process.
- Some of this stuff is an error and I have to fix it.
- But good criticism requires some distance, an outside perspective.
- So I ask the same questions. What's working? What isn't working?
What's pretty? What's not pretty? Is it smart? Is it really stupid?
- He uses a chair in his studio for reflection and even uses a chair in his latest installation to allow the audience to gain
- So the idea is that one is sitting here kinda watching TV at one in the morning.
All those beers belong to the sitter.
- Rafael understands not everybody will get the message in his artwork and he acknowledges that by painting in
- Everything we see is mediated by screens so any time I use this and I use it a lot in my work,
I'm kind of acknowledging the fact that paintings in our life and our viewpoints are kind of glitchy.
- Rafael was seemingly born with an outsider s perspective.
- He just had a different way of looking at the world.
- Barb Salas remembers her son as mostly happy,
growing up on a farm outside Ripon.
- He was always living in his own -- very much living in your own world.
- I always felt very internal.
I was always thinking about something else.
- Rafael takes much of his inspiration from rural America but it's not about sunsets and wheat fields. His artist s
- My own moods and my own outlook on life is often -- there's a darkness there.
So my art work has always sort of reflected an element of bleakness or sadness.
- Rafael explains that with a white mother and a Mexican-American father,
he struggled to find his identity.
- But I have to say a mixed race identity is hard.
It's hard to sort of know.
Am I -- do I have an authentic view of Mexican culture?
Do I have an authentic view of rural white culture?
And the answer is yes and no.
I don't assume that the rural white community gets what I'm doing necessarily.
And I don't assume that the Mexican-American community gets it either.
[music]
- He found comfort in the country music his father listened to.
- You know, as a five-year-old kid,
I'd be listening to murder ballads by Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.
So I'm using them.
I'm kind of recreating album covers.
So this is Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger kinda redone.
I always liked country music.
My work always had a certain kind of darkness and I realized at some point that these country music artists were trying to
- Musicians are a recurring motif.
- If a barn could sing or if the sheep could sing or if the country or the landscape could sing,
what would be the song or who would be singing?
So these are kind of archetypes for the land and rural culture in general.
- After high school,
Rafael needed to leave rural Wisconsin to gain the proper perspective.
So it was in New York City that Rafael started painting barns.
- I started to reconnect with Wisconsin while I was in the middle of Brooklyn, New York,
and I that kind of creative distance I think was really good for me.
- Eventually life led him back to Wisconsin and to Ripon College.
- It's something I tell my students as well.
I think it's really important to leave a place of comfort
and to find a way to remove yourself from what s known.
- Rafael still returns to his mother's sheep farm to help out.
- I'm still inspired by the landscape and its moods.
- Immersed in art,
Rafael is comfortable with who he is and his own perspective.
- My work just sort of comes from this world view and it s how I see it.
You know I try to make work that is beautiful but I also understand that that's not -- it's not going to necessarily