‘Heaven ’N’ Earth’: Sayre Gomez blurs the reality and illusion of Los Angeles
Sayre Gomez’s ‘Heaven ‘N‘ Earth’ at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels explores the contrasts between wealth and poverty, reality and illusion in Los Angeles
‘Heaven ‘N‘ Earth’, Sayre Gomez’s latest exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, begins with the former. Under the celestial glow of the gallery’s top-floor skylight, a meticulously crafted model of a ramshackle two-storey clapboard house occupies the floor’s centre, surrounded on four walls by photorealistic paintings of perfect Californian sunsets.
Scale Replica of the Past, Present and Future (Peabody Werden House) is a recreation of a historic house built in the Boyle Heights neighbourhood of LA, shortly before the turn of the 20th century. When funds for its restoration dried up in 2016, the house was simply lifted off its foundations and moved across the street to make way for a new apartment block.
‘Heaven ’N’ Earth‘ by Sayre Gomez at Xavier Hufkens
As an accidental monument to LA’s spiralling gentrification and displacement problems, the house symbolises Gomez’s key concern with mapping the physical and spiritual spaces left in the wake of the city’s rampant urban development. Fittingly, residents are absent from any of the work and yet traces of their unseen lives are everywhere.
On the floor below, Gomez’s simulacral renderings of glass emergency doors evoke the eeriness of a decrepit strip mall. Gomez infuses the surface of each painting with tactile signs of wear and ageing, further evidence of a neglected world and the ephemera of commerce that survives it.
Gomez revels in this blurring of artifice and reality and in the home of Hollywood perhaps this should be expected. In addition to the trompe-l'œil of his glass doors, Gomez digitally manipulates other paintings by collaging photographs and adding airbrushed details to create symbolically resonant compositions.
Large-scale works like We Pay Cash and Progress Maker (both 2023) fuse a foreground of destruction and dinginess with the gleaming glass and steel backdrop of downtown LA’s skyline. In Progress Maker, the hulking form of a concrete paving machine recalls the tractors in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, steamrolling communities in the name of profit and fortifying the boundary between rich and poor.
These contrasts between centre and periphery, wealth and poverty, reality and illusion, underpin the exhibition as a whole, offering a poignant reflection on a city where homelessness has grown by around 80 per cent since 2015. Nowhere does this feel more stark than in the gallery’s basement, where the lightwell glass has been tinted orange to infuse the space with an infernal incandescence.
Wallpaper* Newsletter
Receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories from around the world direct to your inbox.
Adding to the sense of catastrophe are two paintings of shopping trolleys, somewhat of a recurring motif for the artist and a ubiquitous sign of LA’s nomadic homeless. Here Gomez presents them on fire, and in direct dialogue with a sculpture of a blackened and melted electric car charger. Down in the basement these powerful portents of climate change and petrochemical nihilism are the proverbial Earth to the upper floor’s heaven. The reality feels much closer to hell.
Sayre Gomez, ’Heaven ‘N‘ Earth’, is on display at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, Belgium, until 2 March 2024 xavierhufkens.com
-
Discothèque perfumes evoke the scent of Tokyo in the year 2000
As Discothèque gets ready to launch its first perfume collection, Mary Cleary catches up with the brand’s founders
By Mary Cleary Published
-
This unassuming London house is a radical rethinking of the suburban home
Station Lodge by architect Andrei Saltykov in South West London offers a radical subversion to regional residential architecture
By Ellie Stathaki Published
-
Explore 100 years of Svenskt Tenn and the interiors Estrid Ericson has crafted
‘A Philosophy of Home’ explores 100 years of Svenskt Tenn and the daring vision for interiors its founder Estrid Ericson developed
By Diana Budds Published
-
Mona Kuhn’s love affair with Rudolph Schindler’s modernist LA home
‘The Schindler House: A Love Affair’ features artist Mona Kuhn’s surreal-inspired silver prints evoking an impossible love
By Hunter Drohojowska-Philp Published
-
Crisis point: Josh Kline's world is wiped out by climate change
Josh Kline's dystopian show is currently on at MOCA in Los Angeles
By Hannah Silver Published
-
Alexander May, founder of LA studio Sized, on the joys of creative polymathy
Creative director Alexander May tells us of the multidisciplinary approach that drives his LA studio Sized and its offspring, a 5,000 sq ft event space and an exhibition series
By Hannah Silver Published
-
Los Angeles art exhibitions: the best shows to see in October
Read our pick of the best Los Angeles art exhibitions to see this month, from Nick Egan's creative rebellion at NeueHouse Hollywood to Beth Cavener at Carpenters Workshop
By Carole Dixon Last updated
-
Artist Emmanuelle Castellan’s textural takeover in Brussels
La Verrière gallery in Brussels and Fondation d’entreprise Hermès present ‘Spektrum’, infused with colour and texture by the works of Emmanuelle Castellan
By Hannah Silver Published
-
Zanele Muholi celebrates South Africa’s Black LGBTI communities in LA and London
Zanele Muholi's portraits and sculptures are currently on show at Southern Guild Los Angeles and the Tate Modern, London
By Hannah Silver Published
-
Alicja Kwade and Agnes Martin in Los Angeles: time, temporality and perception
Artists Alicja Kwade and Agnes Martin are in dialogue at Pace Gallery, Los Angeles
By Emily McDermott Published
-
The ageing female body and the cult of youth: Joan Semmel in Belgium
Joan Semmel’s ‘An Other View’ is currently on show at Xavier Hufkens, Belgium, reimagining the female nude
By Hannah Silver Published