Rafael Cardenas is known for his high-contrast, high-drama black and white street photography, but in “Backyard Tableaux,” his new exhibition at the Vincent Price Art Museum,  his color photographs of quasi-urban backyard parties evoke the artistry of historical eras like Impressionism, Pop, and even the Renaissance. The dozen images in “Backyard Tableaux” combine the straightforward vernacular of genre and still life photographs, with the luminosity and momentousness of classical and photorealist painting.

Rafael Cardenas, Hostess (2018). Chomographic print on Plexiglass. Courtesy of the artist.

The scenic images possess the depth, cinematic luminosity, stage blocking, and density of atmospheric detail characteristic of academic figure painting, channeling elements of the Old Masters with a low-key, familial sensibility. The photographs’ ultimate power comes from the absolute ordinariness of the action. In place of elders and sages, choirs and angels, vestal virgins and knights errant, witness only friends and family eat and swim, greet each other warmly and drink cold beer, and dress up just a little.

Rafael Cardenas, Poolsiders (2018). Chomographic print on Plexiglass. Courtesy of the artist.

The gorgeous woman in the white bustier jokingly holding a pineapple top like a hat in Hostess is like a Mel Ramos come to life and ready to dance. The backlit row of Adirondack chairs and the glowing, billowing party flags in Poolsiders look like a chunkier version of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, or a hipper take on La Grenouillere of Claude Monet. This is especially true of Cardenas’ Backyard Tableau 2—a rather operatic work in which women greet each other while men survey a table laden with food and drink—that owes something to Bill Viola in its casting of modern people inside symbolic tableaux.

Rafael Cardenas, Buoyancy (2018). Chomographic print on Plexiglass. Courtesy of the artist.

The still life works have a more contemporary painterly feel, a quasi-realism that looks and beguiles like the paintings of James Rosenquist. Or rather, that looks like a photograph specifically in the same mediated way that Rosenquist’s paintings do. In the cool flatness of the blue pool flotation rings of Buoyancy and particularly in Las Chelas, in which a cooler of ice-water and beer takes on the glinting sprawl of a coral reef in the tide. All of these and a richness of further detail is an optical delight; its deployment in the service of an intimate documentarian impulse of daily life is a conceptual one.

Rafael Cardenas, Las Chelas (2018). Chomographic print on Plexiglass. Courtesy of the artist.

Rafael Cardenas, “Backyard Tableaux,” April 28 – July 28, 2018, at the Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles College, 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park, CA 91754. vincentpriceartmuseum.org