The Monterey Bay Aquarium shows us the ocean through the eyes of young Latino painters.

For visitors wandering through the main floor of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the warm green glow of the kelp forest tank is calling out like a giant anglerfish bulb. Upon approach, it appears a splotch of the kelp forest has leaked out of the tank, crawled across the floor and suctioned itself to a nearby wall like a starfish.

This splotch of luminescent gold-green is San Francisco artist Jay Mercado’s painting “Ocean Beach.” It’s a magnificently organic image of thick, pliant stalks of kelp in repose. Wound into a languid clump, its knotted tranquility suggests the violence that tore the kelp from its roots and hurled it onto the beach, while simultaneously conveying a serene inevitability. The rubbery texture of Mercado’s kelp stalks is so visceral it radiates tensile strength and the salt of the sea. It’s a beautiful display of life in death on the edge of the ocean that manages the impossible in art. It communicates truth.

This amazing littoral zone still life is part of Los Ojos del Mar (Eyes of the Ocean), a unique exhibit of Latino art related to the ocean and its beautiful and mysterious inhabitants. Hanging now through the New Year at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Los Ojos is the brainchild of Pacific Grove gallery owner and art maven Lisa Coscino.

“I was approached by the Aquarium and asked to put together an exhibit to celebrate their 20th anniversary,” she says. “They’d recently made all their signs and printed material bilingual, and were interested in something involving Latino art.”

Using connections to the Latino art subculture cultivated over the years while working in and owning art galleries in Los Angeles and the Monterey Peninsula, Coscino called on artists such as Frank Romero, Roberto Gil de Montes, and Jay Mercado to contribute to the exhibit. Before long, Coscino had submissions coming in from artists all over the state, most with whom she was already familiar.

“In the Latino community,” she says. “You call five people and they call five people who call five people.”

According to Coscino, the inspiration for the exhibit is the history of the Monterey Peninsula itself. Originally part of Spain before becoming part of Mexico, the Peninsula has deep roots in the Latino community. The show acknowledges the Latino culture’s rich history of art and folklore related to the ocean. Los Ojos del Mar is a celebration of the many ways of interpreting the ocean and its creatures through the eyes of the artists for whom the sea remains a source of inspiration.

One of the most striking aspects of the exhibit is its wide variety of media. The show features clay sculpture, woodcuts, linotypes, oil paintings, photographs, photogravures, etchings, serigraphs, and even a quilt. While the artists hail from all over the world, including Spain, Mexico, Chile, Puerto Rico and the United States, the majority are based in Los Angeles.

What their artwork has in common is an abiding respect for the ocean. Efren Parra’s natural rock sculptures are created from rocks collected over a three-year period in the mid-eighties in Baja California, while Francisco Dominguez’s black-and-white photos capture the majesty of Point Lobos. Both pieces reveal the artists’ intimate relationship with their subjects.

Unai San Martin’s haunting photogravure, “Shark Tail,” captures a phantom in the water, but more importantly, captures the essence of the shark from a human perspective. Peripheral and spooky, the subject’s ‘there-not-there’ qualities are perfectly suited to the photogravure, a 19th century printing process in which an image is etched onto a copper plate, then inked and “painted” on fine paper.

In contrast, Felipe Hernadez’s mixed media piece, “Columbus’ Voyage,” is M.C. Escher meets graffiti art. The geometric detail of the piece is exhilarating. Look closely and find the silhouettes of four sailing vessels cast adrift in a swirling black sea. Another highlight is Jose Lozano’s gouache paintings on paper. As colorful and dream-like as siren songs, they depict mermaids and Mexican wrestlers grappling with dwarfish cherubs.

The educational spirit of the aquarium itself is perhaps best represented by two large pieces hanging at the entrance of the Outer Bay exhibit on the second floor. The first is a surf-themed memory quilt collected from scraps of Aloha print fabric collected from a class of over 60 children. The second is a mural entitled “Water,” created by Francisco Letelier and the fifth grade class of the Santa Monica Alternative School.

Poli Marichal, a member of the esteemed print studio, La Mano Press, has contributed perhaps the most original piece—a series of pop art linocuts depicting the three stages of cell transformation in an octopus. The odd, cartoonish images conjure Lichenstein’s work, and as Coscino puts it, the work is “something you just want to rub your face on, you love it so much.”

Coscino, an Italian-American who jokingly refers to herself as a “white-tina,” was thrilled to curate such a talented group of Latino artists, but was disappointed in her inability to pull more work from the local Latino Arts Community, whose lone representative is Johnny Apodaca.

“It was kind of a disappointment to me,” she says. “But it made me think maybe we need to do a little more outreach locally.”

Regardless, the exhibit is undeniably successful in highlighting often under-represented Latino artists.

Created as part of the Aquarium’s 20th Anniversary celebration, Los Ojos del Mar is also a testament to the facility itself. Many of the pieces in the show were directly inspired by time spent examining the Aquarium’s world-class exhibits. Frank Romero, a painter whose work hangs in the Carnegie Museum and the Smithsonian Institute, contributed a painting of florid purple striped jellyfish in oil and acrylic on canvas. Genaro Molina, a staff photographer for the LA Times, captured images of visitors mesmerized before the Jelly and Outer Bay exhibits. Molina’s images, in particular, evoke the everyday wonder and awe that the Aquarium inspires.

It’s an example of art feeding off art. As the Aquarium is an artistic celebration of the ocean itself, the artwork in Los Ojos del Mar is, in a literal sense, a celebration of the Aquarium. What’s more, it’s a celebration of the beauty and mystery of the Latino community. Like an ocean unto itself, it’s clearly a community with plenty of impact zones, currents and unexploreddeep water.

Los Ojos del Mar is on exhibit on the Main Floor of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, 886 Cannery Row, Monterey, through January 2005. For Aquarium hours and ticket information call 648-4888. For information about the exhibit, contact Lisa Coscino at 646-1939.