NOVEMBER 06 - NOVEMBER 29, 2003
The Plainness of Plain Things
1207 14th Street
TRU-103-OC
A new series of consummately composed and exquisitely brushed paintings of Marc Trujillo go on exhibit at Hackett-Freedman Gallery, November 6 - November 29. Accompanying the exhibition is a full-color catalogue with essay by Los Angeles critic David Pagel.
Just as 17th-century Dutch masters chronicled their marketplaces, courtyards, and flower stalls, Trujillo focuses on capturing the big box retail stores, self-service gas stations, and fast-food chains that make up a large portion of our urban environment. Void of political or moral overtones, these works function both as modern North American genre scenes and as painterly meditations on color, light, and form.
For Trujillo, “the aim when painting is concision.” Although based on direct observation, his paintings are completely synthetic and rigorously structured. While the places depicted are nominally in the Los Angeles area, they are in actuality generic environments that are numbingly familiar to contemporary Americans. From these boxy, cookie-cutter industrial building designs, Trujillo builds compositions based on complicated arrays of angled planes and radial lines that recede into deep space.
Coloristically, the works are also painstakingly balanced. Trujillo mixes the colors for all parts of the painting and keeps them organized dark to light, so that he can work the entire canvas all at once.
It is Trujillo’s depictions of light, more than anything else, that contribute to the synthetic nature of his works. From bright, fluorescent-lit interiors to cloudy night skies, whose horizons are still dimly illuminated by the sun’s fading rays, Trujillo paints light in ways that cannot be captured photographically. In 14481 Sherman Way (2003) the concentrated dark blue of the night sky butts up against the varying artificial brightness of the bus and building interior, generating a velvety, welcoming warmth.
As an artist, Marc Trujillo specializes in giving pause to the frenetic pace of everyday life. All of the places he depicts are a function of the increasingly fast-paced world in which we live, where attention spans have diminished beyond the point of no return.
As art critic David Pagel observes in his catalogue essay: “The gas station depicted in 4822 Van Nuys Boulevard (2002) is not a place where people go to relax, and enjoy some quiet, contemplative time. Even so, that’s what Trujillo’s paintings of discount outlets and video stores deliver. With exceptional fidelity to their surroundings, these unpretentious pictures allow us to see how extraordinary the ordinary world is, when contemplated from the right angle.”
Marc Trujillo has shown nationally and had solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco since receiving his Master of Fine Arts degree from The Yale University School of Art in 1994.
In 2001 he received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Trujillo’s paintings are included in the newly released 100 Artists of the West Coast, a compendium of contemporary artists from San Diego to British Columbia, edited by Douglas Bullis and published by Schiffer Publishing.
His work has been featured in the following publications: ARTnews, Los Angeles Times, Southwest Art, and Artweek, among others. This is Trujillo’s sixth solo exhibition at Hackett-Freedman Gallery. The artist grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico and currently resides in Los Angeles.