Sayre Gomez loves to drive. In the 14 years living in Los Angeles, he’s woven a vast tire tread web around his Boyle Heights studio. Gomez is observant, porous to the spillage of upper-case exclamations and neighbourhood changes that perpetuate his commute. “My recent work is really just a byproduct of sitting in traffic on my way to my studio” he says.
Gomez makes large-scale paintings employing Trompe L’oeil techniques (often used in set-design and signage painting), rebuilding LA around him in searing precision. Windows are recurring motifs in Gomez’s work – a city of endless sunshine splintering strange reflections of capitalism and humanity. The viewer of Gomez’ work is at a distance. Views are obscured or out of focus, as if gazed at through bleary eyes. There is rarely the possibility of something reachable, touchable. The decrepit signs, the peeling stickers, the closed down shop fronts and dying flowers, even the sunset is unsaveable.
Behind Door #1, 2017 Acyrlic on canvas 84 x 120 inches
Untitled, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 108 inches
Glendale Door, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 80 x 30 inches
Tuzo’s, 2020 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 108 inches
Chevy Chase, 2020 Acrylic on canvas 84 x 72 inches
There’s something off-kilter in the work. Gomez undermines his own hyper-realistic approach to painting by collaging and remixing compositional elements. The scenes look familiar, definitely LA, but they aren’t real. The lighting, slightly incongruous, reveals the layers of the image as a fallacy. This makes sense when you think of processing urban images through a car window, at high speed or in a dissociative jam. Everything exists in front of you in a frame and then it doesn’t, one image, then the next. Lights illuminate large stacked signs that help you navigate your way towards a fuller stomach, a quick drink, a cleaner car.
Like Sister Corita Kent and Edward Ruscha, LA incomers like Gomez are preoccupied with the signage that floridly trims every periphery of the city and its accelerated culture. Where Kent and Ruscha’s typographic works express an expansive and jubilant, albeit defiant, approach to the written word within the context of 1960’s pop-art LA, Gomez’s work is planted firmly in the urban and psychological landscape of today. There is an emotional friction in his work, along with the portrayal of social and industrial decline. Gomez is absorbed by this environment, ever sensitive to the intersecting romance, absurdity, and threat, of a sky filled up with empty slogans and metal parts.
Sayre Gomez in view
Lotus, 2019
Acrylic on Canvas
72 x 108 inches
Text by Molly Cranston
Sayre Gomez loves to drive. In the 14 years living in Los Angeles, he’s woven a vast tire tread web around his Boyle Heights studio. Gomez is observant, porous to the spillage of upper-case exclamations and neighbourhood changes that perpetuate his commute. “My recent work is really just a byproduct of sitting in traffic on my way to my studio” he says.
Gomez makes large-scale paintings employing Trompe L’oeil techniques (often used in set-design and signage painting), rebuilding LA around him in searing precision. Windows are recurring motifs in Gomez’s work – a city of endless sunshine splintering strange reflections of capitalism and humanity. The viewer of Gomez’ work is at a distance. Views are obscured or out of focus, as if gazed at through bleary eyes. There is rarely the possibility of something reachable, touchable. The decrepit signs, the peeling stickers, the closed down shop fronts and dying flowers, even the sunset is unsaveable.
Behind Door #1, 2017
Acyrlic on canvas
84 x 120 inches
Untitled, 2019
Acrylic on canvas
72 x 108 inches
Glendale Door, 2019 Acrylic on canvas
80 x 30 inches
Tuzo’s, 2020
Acrylic on canvas
72 x 108 inches
Chevy Chase, 2020
Acrylic on canvas
84 x 72 inches
There’s something off-kilter in the work. Gomez undermines his own hyper-realistic approach to painting by collaging and remixing compositional elements. The scenes look familiar, definitely LA, but they aren’t real. The lighting, slightly incongruous, reveals the layers of the image as a fallacy. This makes sense when you think of processing urban images through a car window, at high speed or in a dissociative jam. Everything exists in front of you in a frame and then it doesn’t, one image, then the next. Lights illuminate large stacked signs that help you navigate your way towards a fuller stomach, a quick drink, a cleaner car.
Like Sister Corita Kent and Edward Ruscha, LA incomers like Gomez are preoccupied with the signage that floridly trims every periphery of the city and its accelerated culture. Where Kent and Ruscha’s typographic works express an expansive and jubilant, albeit defiant, approach to the written word within the context of 1960’s pop-art LA, Gomez’s work is planted firmly in the urban and psychological landscape of today. There is an emotional friction in his work, along with the portrayal of social and industrial decline. Gomez is absorbed by this environment, ever sensitive to the intersecting romance, absurdity, and threat, of a sky filled up with empty slogans and metal parts.
Untitled, 2020
Acrylic on canvas
48 x 48 inches
5G, 2019
Acrylic on canvas
84 x 120 inches