Jose Lozano’s Creations Are Impressive on Paper : Art: His dolls and other stuff, on display in Huntington, are drawings imbued with his frank commentaries on contemporary life.

HUNTINGTON BEACH —  Jose Lozano began designing paper dolls six years ago at the request of Vanessa, Amelia and Ileana, his preteen nieces who coveted the cutouts they saw at Sav-On.

“They wanted Madonna, so I did that,” the Fullerton artist said. “I’d spend hours with them, drawing them stuff.”

But soon, toys became art. Lozano turned to family, friends and the Latino community he lives in to create “sociological portraits.” These were still paper dolls--or, rather, frameable drawings of paper dolls and their garments--but imbued with Lozano’s frank commentaries on contemporary life.

“Munecos y Otras Cosas” (Dolls and Other Things), a collection of these and other works, opens today at the Huntington Beach Art Center’s Store Gallery.

“Jose’s drawings reflect his culture and orientation as a first-generation Mexican,” said gallery coordinator Pat Gomez. The people he portrays are “archetypes, but he gives them distinct identities and a certain dignity.”

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Born in Los Angeles, Lozano, 37, lived in Juarez, Mexico, just at the Texas border, before moving to Fullerton with his family at age 9. He holds a master’s degree in painting from Cal State Fullerton and recently garnered local attention by winning a 1994 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He was also one of two county artists in this spring’s “Across the Street: Self-Help Graphics and Chicano Art in Los Angeles,” a Laguna Art Museum group exhibit.

Like a fiction writer, Lozano bases each of his paper doll characters on many different people and personalities.

“It’s almost like writing a short story,” he said during a phone interview from his home the other day. “You can be in charge of placing or designing these peoples lives.”

“Victorina,” one of his paper dolls, is an homage to some of the working women in his family, he said, specifically single women raising children and holding down multiple jobs. The pencil drawing depicts Victorina in her underwear (the usual paper doll practice) alongside her waitress’s uniform, the suit she wears when she sells Avon cosmetics (“Avon” is written on her tote bag) and a casual outfit drawn with two babies at the doll’s hips.

“My mother sells Avon on the side,” Lozano said, adding that before she retired two years ago she was the only female worker at a mobile-home manufacturer in Chino. “I remember seeing her coming home from work in her Dr. Scholl’s shoes when I was a kid.”

“La Julie,” another paper doll, comes with provocative outfits Lozano described as low class. She represents women in transition whom he has encountered shortly after they arrived from Mexico.

“Some had sordid lives--they were like ex-bar maids fleeing their abusive husbands,” he said. “They’d drop by my Aunt Nellie’s house in Fullerton, or I’d see them once in a while waiting for the buses on the streets.”

Such works haven’t always met the best reception.

“I would show these dolls to my nieces,” Lozano said, “but they wanted glamorous role models like Madonna. Life is not always so glamorous. I tried to put a little reality into their lives.”

Other critics charged that the artist was perpetuating negative stereotypes of Latino culture. But while the paper dolls lend whimsy to his work and Lozano doesn’t use a heavy hand, he shuns “the Hallmark school of Latino art,” which permits cheerful sentiment only.

“Because I’m a Latino artist, I don’t have a right to express myself? Art isn’t all one-sided,” he said. “It’s not all positive.”

Lozano takes up the disintegration of the family in another paper doll piece, “La Familia Que Nunca Fue” (The Family That Never Was). Man, woman and child are pictured in masks worn by Mexican wrestlers. The masks symbolize the anonymous, downtrodden masses or “the plight of everyman” because they rob the wearer’s individuality, the artist said.

“There must be eight or 10 broken families in my [extended] family” he said. “The whole father and mother and three children thing is almost a thing of the past.”

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The “Other Things” portion of Lozano’s exhibit includes colored drawings with images of sleepwalkers who have been lulled into a mindless, soulless, zombie-like state by overconsumption of mass media, from comic books to People magazine to television coverage of a famous athlete’s murder trial.

“The Sleepwalker,” with a slumbering figure painted on a pillow, is a commentary on mass-produced dreams and false aspirations, Lozano said, inspired by Emma Bovary, the title character in Gustave Flaubert’s classic “Madame Bovary.”

“She was the first heroine in modern literature to read mass-produced magazines and stuff,” he said, “so all of her dreams and aspirations came from someone else. They were borrowed. They were not really hers.”

“The Sleepwalker,” he said, represents the state we’re in, watching the O.J. Simpson murder trial, reading about people’s lives.

“That shouldn’t be taking up such major parts of our thought processes,” he said. “Emma was the first victim of that disease, and we all have it too.”

* “Munecos y Otras Cosas” runs today through Aug. 13 at the Huntington Beach Art Center, Store Gallery, 538 Main St., Huntington Beach. Hours are Tuesday through Thursday, noon-8 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, noon-9 p.m.; and Sunday, noon-4 p.m. $2-$3. Tonight, a 6:30 reception for the artist will be followed from 7:30 to 9:30 with spoken-word performances by Elisabeth Belile and Willie Sims and jazz with Noah Young and the Erotic Zone Trio. Reception and performances are free. (714) 374-1650.