Sayre Gomez at François Ghebaly

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Here the cage bars become less literal. Fencing dissipates into the photographic techniques, a picture's non-focus is a frosted glass wall. A fake palm cell tower, a strip-mall sign: the impediment to a sunset. Homeless encampments censored against full identification. Gomez, is Hollywood's landscape painter with a sigh, using the techniques of tinseltown's advertorial golden era, the quick seduction of airbrushed leg landscapes. But instead of vistas we get cellphone towers. Only the grisly crust gets Gomez's full HD defect.  The stupid vile blackness of an Enterprise car rental sign to match Reinhardt's own. Whether this throwing in your face shit is stupidly cruel or realistic is your personal preference. "But I painted the banality so accurately!" cries the painter of life. "A mimesis so exact it enacts the drear it represents!" Call it antidote to the naive who think Hollywood is the nice part of LA, medicine to those who have never actually stood at Hollywood and Vine, walked that one block south of the restaurants in downtown. Someday this will all be yours, someday this will all be gentrified. Gomez at whim is able to flick his vaseline seduction on or, more powerfully, shut it off. This makes him coy. A gamesman. The paintings giveth and the paintings taketh, Gomez with his fingers. Yes, think Ed Ruchsa, but now words obscuring the view are attached to sign-poles, very realistic, yes, literal, yes. Literalness in all its stupidity is given in all seriousness its hard dullness.


See too: Andrei Koschmieder at Jenny’s, Sayre Gomez at Ghebaly Gallery

Sayre Gomez at Ghebaly Gallery

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Painting the walls of your cage generally comes in less literal forms. The artist as tempestuous gorilla acquiescing to perform his own repairs on the prison of his cell, look how nice these bars I have erected are, how polished this fencing. When you could simply change the focus to what's outside. Instead some vague construction. The old predicament of art, to peel away the stickers marking the surface of cynicism: our Bad Boy Attitude. Elegiac Walls. All of this is obvious, it's right there, legible; the point is that it’s alluring. We want to keep them around.