The subtitle of Vincent Valdez’s mid-career retrospective at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Just a Dream . . . , summons a disenchanting fall to reality. It is a phrase one may invoke to create emotional distance from potential disappointment—“It’s just a dream”—or to downplay such disappointment after the fact—“It was just a dream.” But devoid of a preceding subject and verb, the phrase remains referentially and temporally enigmatic. Like Valdez’s art, it looks simultaneously to the past, present, and future. Moreover, the would-be trivializing finality of the fragmentary statement is deferred by an ellipsis. These three dots deny the comfort of a resolution, and much like the specters of history that linger in Valdez’s imagery, they are unredeemed and demanding a reckoning.

Upon entering the exhibition, visitors first confront a powerful portrait rendered with striking realism. The bald and shirtless masculine figure returns the viewer’s gaze, with its face and body covered in tattoos, and hands clasped gently together in front of its scarred chest. Despite a potentially intimidating appearance, its expression is tender, even slightly wounded. Lit in a fiery glow, the feathered red edges of its body dissipate into an incongruous blue, pink, and purple gradient—a cotton candy-hued expanse of indeterminate lighting and space. The work’s title, So Long, Mary Ann (2019), draws the eye to the eponymous tattoo on the side of the figure’s neck, memorializing its dearly departed. The subject’s expression is mournful but irresolute, introducing the show with an ambiguously melancholic tenor.

From this painting, visitors are presented with an open choice. Without a prescribed or apparent course through the free-flowing exhibition space, one must determine their own course, eschewing the guided chronological development that is typical of retrospective curatorial models. It is a layout that rewards meandering and recursion, allowing the viewer to discover both resonances and departures among the works through the gallery’s abundant sight lines. By contrast, the exhibition catalog organizes the works thematically, under such titles as “The Witness,” “The Remembering,” and “The United States of Amnesia.” The present show departs from this organizational logic, allowing the artworks to communicate more freely with one another. Here, the spectator’s activated role is critical to this exhibition’s success; they become the Barthesian postmodern participant, an indispensable contributor to the multifaceted meanings generated by and between the artworks.

This Houston manifestation of the exhibition is the first in CAMH’s history to occupy both the main-level Brown Foundation Gallery and the downstairs Nina and Michael Zilkha Gallery. Reviewing the last twenty-five years of Valdez’s multidisciplinary practice, the corpus shown here is a sustained meditation on personal and collective memory—as the catalog themes would suggest—brimming with references to US politics and culture since 1977, the year of the artist’s birth. Taken as a whole, the exhibition is an autobiography defined not only by private episodes but also by the indelible impressions of historical events. It traces a trajectory in which the individual and the social intertwine, at once a gimlet-eyed appraisal of history and a document of its inescapable, enduring weight on lived experience.

Perhaps the most direct example of this is Since 1977 (2019), a series of lithography crayons on paper works. The faces of the eight US presidents who have held office since Valdez’s birth up to the year of the work’s creation are depicted in negative space, appearing ghost-like against the foreboding black backgrounds. Each face is substantially cropped by the bottom edge of the picture plane, gradually more so with each successive portrait. Jimmy Carter is visible only from the tip of his nose up, and by the time we arrive at Donald Trump, the forehead and hair are all that remain. Read from left to right, the heads follow a descending line, suggesting a steady moral decline. The fact of their instant recognizability despite such fragmentation suggests that these countenances have come to function less as portraits and more as logos, distilled down to symbols of political ideology, persistent even in their continuous effacement and descent. The works are hung on the wall at approximately half the standard height of most museums; we look down—physically and allegorically—at each presidential visage, reflecting the personal loss of trust in the government as experienced by a citizen. The final frame of the series presents only a black void, conveying both an absence to be filled by the next elected leader and the culmination of the degradation that preceded it.

A considerable portion of the other artworks on view evince a sense of the cinematic in their spectacular scale, horizontal format, and pictorial references. The fact that much of the work is produced in series, evoking the successive frames of the moving picture, augments this relation. Cinema, in Valdez’s art, serves as a model of collectivity, but also a reflection of the profound impact of images—both how images organize us as subjects and how we, in turn, organize ourselves around images in social and political ways. There is, for example, The Beginning is Near (An American Trilogy), Chapter One: The City, The City I (2015–16), a part of a series within a series. The painting is a thirty-foot-long gathering of Klanspeople in black and white, a reminder of prominent Klan activity in Texas as recently as the 1980s. Its hooded inhabitants challenge the viewer’s gaze as if interrupted from their malevolent proceedings. Curators Patricia Restrepo and Denise Markonish take advantage of the painting’s three-panel composition, mounting the canvases on inwardly angled walls, creating a discomforting environment that encircles the viewer, much like the widescreen format of CinemaScope films.

Across the upper gallery is The Strangest Fruit (2013), eight disturbingly life-like—and approximately life-sized—paintings depicting hanged brown bodies, drawing attention to the overlooked and erased history of lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Texas during the first half of the 20th century. These figures, some limply suspended while others brutally contorted, hang against a stark white background, the implements and contexts of their killings notably absent. Like with So Long, Mary Ann, the bodies are aglow with flaming red light, though here the connotation is far more malicious. In both The Strangest Fruit and The City I, we see signs that these ostensibly historical events are far more contemporary than we would wish to believe. The hanged bodies are dressed in all-too-current fashions like a basketball jersey or Nike sneakers. One Klansperson holds a smartphone, while the headlights from a contemporary Chevrolet pickup truck parked on the right margin of the scene bathe the gathering with sinister clarity. In the latter example, these details are leveraged against the black and white palette, suggestive of the infamous white supremacist film Birth of a Nation (1915). Both of these works communicate an uncomfortable truth: the noose and the white pointed hood are less remnants of a racist past than they are the looming threats of a racist present.

 Downstairs, parked in the middle of the gallery is the eye-catching and harrowing El Chavez Ravine (2005–7): a painted 1953 Chevy Good Humor ice cream truck, commissioned by musician Ry Cooder to coincide with the release of his 2005 album, Chávez Ravine. Valdez’s vignettes unfold the displacement of Angelenos from their homes in the late 1950s under eminent domain to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium, further illustrating Valdez’s commitment to recording the historical injustices committed against Latine individuals  in the US. The standout curatorial feature of this gallery, however, is the drawing room: an enclosed space covered on all four walls with sketches and prints, hung in some places from floor to ceiling. In the center, two industrial cabinets of flat-file drawers stand back-to-back, filled with sketches, polaroids, and ephemera that trace Valdez’s life as an artist as far back as age four. Organized chronologically, the drawers document Valdez’s artistic progression, from childhood tracings of comic book superheroes to grisly depictions of weary soldiers. Here we see the rapidity with which Valdez honed his draftsmanship and how young he landed on mature themes of masculinity, national identity, and imperialistic warfare that would carry through his practice for years to come. But if the well-worn, Vasarian art-historical custom of proceeding through a developmental narrative of the artist’s life is here reinstated against the grain of the rest of the exhibition’s circuitous and more imaginative configuration, it is at least tempered by its negation of the myth of the born artistic genius. Instead of a divinely preordained talent, we see something of a logical evolution and evidence of exhaustive training, experimentation, and a lifelong questioning of images as they are mediated through media and popular culture.

Yes, Valdez is capable of realizing viscerally illusionistic scenes, and while it may be tempting to categorize his later works as photorealistic, to do so would be to become fixated on technique, ignoring the imaginative skepticism in his art toward the chronicling of history and the truth of the image. Instead, I want to suggest that the work is better described as photo-oneirism, a vivid world where memory, dream, and reality are indistinguishable. This is not the psychoanalytic dream world of Surrealism, but a realism built on a tenuous and suspicious relationship to reality as it is historically narrated. Valdez’s art is evidence that the imagined image can communicate something far more proximate to our current circumstances than the photographic document. In this light, the title of the exhibition is employed with a certain irony—as if it is only too easy, and foolish, to dismiss dreams from reality.