One of the most vivid visual memories of my first weeks in Los Angeles: Driving on the I-10 in the dirty pastel-hued sunset and catching a fleeting glimpse of something on the other side of the guardrail. It looked like a palm tree but not quite a palm tree, surreally perky and symmetrical with something strapped to it right below the fronds. I didn’t know what it was, but it felt like a sight truly specific to L.A.; something that would not exist anywhere else, yet something that would never make it to a picture postcard.
I loved that weird fake palm tree because it made me feel I had been let behind the scenes of the L.A. we see in the movies. At that moment I felt that I was finally, truly, here.
That cell tower masquerading as a palm tree might never make it to a postcard, but it made it to a painting. There it was, against the same hazy twilight sky, in Sayre Gomez’s exhibition at François Ghebaly. Seeing it again made me ridiculously happy, relieved and understood – like I finally had words to explain a feeling.
Sayre Gomez paints in incredible photorealistic detail a hallucinatory Los Angeles stuck in an indefinite time. His L.A. is a twilight city of sun-bleached mini-mall signage, the hunched-over forms of Skid Row tents and the occasional menacing thunderstorm, looking as the purplish lightning strikes have been copied off a lovingly airbrushed 18-wheeler.
The sights feel instinctively familiar and the flawless execution might fool you, but they are not depictions of real places. Gomez puts the images together from stock photographs, cell phone photos and found images.
Gomez traffics in illusions, airbrushed to trompe l’œil perfection. His paintings of life-size Venice and Glendale shop doors are adorned with faded little MasterCard and Amex stickers – do they still make them? – and invite the visitor to walk into them. Only the unpainted sides of the canvases give away the game.
Hang around in the gallery long enough and you’ll see a visitor trying to lean on one of the dirty yellow parking stanchions that dot the space. In a split second the poor victim will find out they are not steel but cardboard; perfect make-believe down to the grime and fruit sticker saying “RIPE READY TO EAT”.
It all is familiar and strange, strange and familiar.
Isn’t L.A. always a little make-believe?
Every L.A. artist has their version of the city. Chris Burden’s “Metropolis II” (2011) speaks to the city’s maddening traffic with its ever-whirring toy cars. Catherine Opie’s photographs of Elizabeth Taylor’s Bel Air estate in “700 Nimes Road” (2010–2011) capture the weird human-celebrity-human negotiation Hollywood imposes on us. Mike Kelley’s “Street Sign” (2014) looks like a castoff but is a (very) short meditation on the grubby, feverish aspiration of this city: a sign with the word “AUDITIONS” scrawled on it with red and black Sharpies.
Gomez’s paintings of cell towers and signage might not spell out “L.A.” quite as obviously as knotty freeway junctions, Hollywood celebrities and palm-tree-lined streets, but that’s because they get at the very essence of this city: what is really there, what is chosen to be shown, what is real, what is not real, and how much do those distinctions matter, anyway.
I still try to spot those fake palm trees every time I take the I-10.
Sayre Gomez: X-Scapes
September 20 – November 3, 2019
François Ghebaly
2245 E Washington Blvd., Los Angeles