Visual ventriloquist

BERKELEY -- Enrique Chagoya is a savvy, rambunctious and surprisingly respectful thief. He takes what he needs from the general store of art history and uses it to furnish his own aesthetic. He plucks a few cartoon superheroes off the shelf, sets them among Aztec gods, borrows some settings from Goya, the soup can motif from Warhol, a color scheme from Russian revolutionary propaganda, a handful of icons from the Catholic Church, a touch of Disney. He plays freely with the goods, contriving surprises and generating friction. Throughout, he uses humor as a weapon against a multitude of wrongs.

A 25-year survey of Chagoya's work at the UC Berkeley Art Museum flaunts the artist's versatility and his impassioned embrace of hybridity. In paintings, drawings, prints and scroll-style or accordion-fold books, Chagoya addresses specific cultural or political incidents as well as the broader dynamics of encounter and conquest, the use and abuse of power. At its best, the work is brilliant. When he falters, it feels loud but thin, all insistence and no nuance. His most recent paintings are the most disappointing in this respect, but there are not enough of them to drag down an otherwise ebullient display of intelligence and talent.

The show, "Borderlandia," was organized by Patricia Hickson for the Des Moines Art Center, where it opened, and will travel in September to the Palm Springs Art Museum. It comes with a handsome catalog, the largest publication of Chagoya's work to date.

Born in Mexico City, Chagoya moved to the U.S. in 1979 after studying political economics in college. His social conscience was catalyzed, he recalls, by the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, when Mexican police fired on student demonstrators in the capital, and by the government's suppression of the nature and extent of the violence. He settled in the Bay Area, earned a master's in fine arts at UC Berkeley and has been teaching art at Stanford since 1995.

The exhibition presents Chagoya's work in clusters, according to theme or medium, rendering a sense of chronological development both elusive and irrelevant. Cannibalism -- literal and metaphoric -- comes into play repeatedly. An image of Aztecs making a meal of former Gov. Pete Wilson spoofs a stereotype of primitive savagery. Each figure holds up an ear, a heart, a tongue, a penis or a brain before digging in, and a bound and sweating Mickey Mouse is also being seasoned for the feast. In the picture, "The Governor's Nightmare" has come true: Our neighbors south of the border have taken over and are subsuming and consuming all that is powerful and precious in our state.