‘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
![Photograph of destroyed car against backdrop of city skyline at sunset, from Sayre Gomez ‘Heaven ‘N‘ Earth’ exhibition at Xavier Hufkens](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/GpbcsWDoDxMQzNFGxXUY9g-415-80.jpeg)
‘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
Family Room, 2023, acrylic on canvas
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.
Progress Maker, 2023, acrylic on canvas
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.
Sayre Gomez
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 + Free Download
For a free digital copy of August Wallpaper*, celebrating Creative America, sign up today to receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories
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
-
‘Hedonistic and avant-garde’: Rabanne’s Julian Dossena on the legacy of the chainmail 1969 bag
Paco Rabanne’s 1969 chainmail handbag encapsulates the late designer’s futuristic, space-age style. Current creative director Julien Dossena tells Wallpaper* about the bag’s particular pleasures
By Jack Moss Published
-
Postcard from Paris: Olympic fever takes over the streets
On the eve of the opening ceremony of Paris 2024, our correspondent shares her views from the streets of the capital about how the event is impacting the urban landscape.
By Minako Norimatsu Published
-
The Mercury Prize nominees for 2024 have been revealed
Charli XCX, The Last Dinner Party and Beth Gibbons are amongst this year's nominees
By Charlotte Gunn 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 July
Read our pick of the best Los Angeles art exhibitions to see this month, from Mickalene Thomas at The Broad to Ed Ruscha at LACMA
By Carole Dixon Published
-
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
-
An avant-garde Korean art movement resurfaces in LA
LA's Hammer Museum gets its teeth into avant-garde Korean art with ‘Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s’
By Anne Soward Published
-
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s LA-made work goes on show at Gagosian
‘Made on Market Street’ at Gagosian in Beverly Hills is the first show to present works made by the young artist between 1982 and 1984
By Hunter Drohojowska-Philp Published