There Is Nothing cold or clean about Richard Alvarez’ works on glass - they evoke instead the dusty panes of bodegas where coffeecans nestle beneath plaster statues of Santa Barbara, trimmed in sequins for her feast day. For this artist, the mottled windows of his boyhood with their mirror shards and torn mylar have become the backdrop of his most memorable paintings, where Yoruba goddesses share the stage with Puerto Rican Nationalist heroes, overlayed with trick writing, glitter, oyster-shell and mica fairy dust. In places the image breaks down into the barest shimmer of a saintly face – as if a still-damp shroud of Turin was pressed onto white glitter, then clear glass.

The Frequent Appearances of Santeria deities and their Catholic counterparts in Alvarez’ work are quite natural, given his childhood. Raised in the Bronx by his French Canadian mother, a practicing santera (priestess), he grew up with the rites of New York’s unofficial “second religion,” including bird sacrifices tossed out of his apartment’s windows. “By fourteen, there was lots of pressure on me to make santo (priest) within three years. I began to rebel, changed my look to a very hard-edged punk aesthetic, and headed downtown to the Mudd Club.”

Here, In the electric Downtown clubworld of the early eighties, this openly gay, half-Dominican teenager raised by his white mother and adoptive black father found affirmation. Alvarez befriended artists like Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat, who encouraged him to create, insisting that “It doesn’t matter if you’re form the Bronx.” At Danceteria, his signature smile at full wattage, he met his mentor, fashion eminence and costume designer Patricia Field. For twelve years, he assisted her on a wide range of styling projects, including the television shows Wiseguy and Crime Story. Within the kaleidoscopic beehive of the House of Field, costume was art – “we painted sets with costumes and hair.”

Alvarez Began to paint with other things in 1995 during a bluesy period when he devoured volumes of Jung and Genet along with the obligatory Twelve Step tracts. Stunned by the images of forgotten faith that poured out onto his early paintings, he opened a studio in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood, where the wraparound light infused the panels and their iconic Caribbean subjects (the peasant archetyped “El Jibarito,” the Santeria orisha, the omnipresent American Express logo.) The works were first shown in his friend Cabiria’s “classically tacky” gallery on the Lower East Side in 2000 and have since been included in group shows at halcyon, Jill Platner and Other Worlds.

“I’ve Been Compared with other artists who use religious imagery in their work, sometimes in a way that is offensive to believers. Given my past, my complete negation of all faith in childhood and my return to it years later, my paintings can not have that same meaning – they are actually about belief and glorification.” Behind him, on the wall, Santa Clara’s face shimmers for an instant, then disappears from view as Brooklyn’s sky turns to evening.

                                                                                                                                                                      -- Chi Chi Valente