Elmer Guevara was ten minutes late to our call. “Sorry,” he told me, “I had to download Chrome.” (The call software I use, I realize now, only runs on Chrome.) I apologized but he waved it off, thanking me profusely for my interest in his work. We were speaking about his new show Recess at Lyles & King on Henry Street in the southernmost area of Manhattan’s Chinatown. I’d seen it just three days after it opened on June 26th, completely by accident: it was hot, & I was sweating, & roaming, & tired, & galleries, as every sensible person knows, are an excellent place to pant in chilled air for a few minutes. But this time was different for me.
Eight paintings, startlingly lucid, alluring, illuminated from within, appeared before me like scenes from a dream, each one reflecting a different aspect of my home city of Los Angeles, many things I knew & loved but had forgotten the feeling of. In “The Third Shift,” a man in classic purple-&-gold basketball shorts lounges on a turquoise mattress that seems crumpled, misshapen, almost collapsing with him still inside, while the sneakered feet of small children looking on frame the painting’s edges. & in “Hoova' Park Stroll,” a boy in a Lakers jersey turns away from the adult version of himself; in the distance, neighbors lounge & loiter on porches, blood stains the sidewalk underneath a a verdant, weedy slice of lawn, & the dusty blue sky is hot to the eye.
Each painting is at once mysterious & instantly recognizable — with intentionally disorienting photographic layers from Guevara’s meticulous image transfer process, & foregrounds densely packed with symbols, numbers, & colors that all Angelenos consider their own. In the end, Recess is a show about Los Angeles, about violence & memory & time & culture, & what it means to move past — or exist within — violence & memory & time & culture. But you don’t have to be from the city to underst& why the work matters, or to receive something from it. You just have to be willing to come home.
—Karissa Ho
A few weeks ago I walked into Lyles & King & then into the room with all your paintings. Then I walked back out & told the person at the front desk, “that room feels like coming home.” Because I'm from LA, &, of course, homesick, so being suddenly surrounded by the imagery of home was almost overwhelming. Brilliant pale blue skies & gold & purple & 24 & 8 & hot asphalt, even while I was all the way across the country.
Did you really just walk into the gallery?
I really just walked in. I was on Henry Street, I was meandering. But then I wasn’t. So thank you for that. And congratulations on a great show.
Thank you. Thank you. I'm happy that you just stumbled on it. That area is popping up. I went to Hunter, the studios were literally down the street, so we were always on Henry. & thanks for your interest in the work.
Of course. So I know you often explicitly reference Los Angeles as a city of angels, but any city of angels may as well be a city of ghosts. & what comes through in your work, particularly in this show, is the ghostly, luminous quality of your figures. I know it's because at a technical level, you're using a gel transfer technique. I would appreciate it if you wanted to walk through the process of developing these built-in, pre-entangled histories within your figures — not only what it looks like formally, but also why this layering is important emotionally for these works.
When I was in grad school, I was looking at work from Njideka Crosby, who's a Nigerian artist, & she was using a lot of photo-driven imagery through gel transfers. The gel transfer thing is a really old application technique that's been around for a long time too. So I was looking at her work & I liked the depiction modes that were being played: from very traditional brush painting to very graphic imagery directly coming from photography. At the same time I stumbled upon an essay by Ursula Le Guin on container theory. I liked her idea of how vessels become containers.
So I was thinking of figures — in a literal sense, based on the container theory — as a vessel. & I was trying to work out ideas about inherited traumas. My parents left their home country [of El Salvador] in the eighties because of a civil war. They came here & I was born in LA. & so I've always been curious about their past experience. The challenge of depicting that inherited trauma, the psychological concept, is making it concrete. So with Le Guin’s text & the idea of inherited trauma, I started to use gel transfers, thinking of them as a representation of filling the vessel within the figure.
That's why they're very airy images that take quite a bit of gazing at to actually see what's happening. I do want them to be very soft, ghostly: images that take a little while to read. But they're images that are projecting traumas.
I see. It's about what every, any, immigrant family will well understand — what it means to have trauma, trauma & joy, joy & love & memory embedded in your very person, sometimes physically, but of course cognitively.
I've been thinking about a book I read a while ago, Jean Stein's West of Eden, which is about LA. I didn't get much out of it except for one quote, which was something about how light in California has a pressure & a weight to it that you don't feel anywhere else. I wonder if you’d like to talk about how light & shadow operate in Recess — & why it's important for light to have presence & weight.
I like the strength of light that you're talking about. It comes across because I lived in New York for three years — the only time I ever really lived anywhere outside of Southern California — & something happened. The air felt sunny when I was home. Vibrant color was even more intensified in LA. When I came back, I felt that the potency of saturated colors was stronger. I enjoy painting here because there’s an energy of color & intensity of light that I feel.
I don't think light & shadow always make proper sense in my paintings. It’s because I'm inventing worlds, I'm world-building, sometimes light instead makes sense depending on how it's being activated with the shadow. But it doesn’t always make perfect sense, & it doesn't bother me that my paintings aren’t very traditional paintings that read with perfect lighting.
That’s so interesting. Actually, my strongest childhood memories are not really memories of particular events, but memories of how light felt in a room. We had a sunroom-slash-office that my parents put a trampoline in, & in the late afternoon it was just flooded with sunlight. & I remember it was so hot there, but it was also really beautiful. The way light works in these paintings is close to the way memory works.
Mmhm.
It doesn't necessarily make sense. Light can be more of a feeling, looping & remaking itself, than a perfect line or shape. I would like to ask, while we're here thinking about memory & time, about the literal dates that are inscribed in these paintings, which also don't always make logical, linear sense.
Yeah, it's become a signature of mine. I do this in almost all my work. I grabbed the idea from a growth chart, like, when you're a child & your parents are keeping track of your height in the year. So it kind of dates you back to that moment, in a way. I use it in that sense — my main focus is trying to situate the viewer to a specific time frame. Yes, these are paintings from neighborhoods, a neighborhood in LA, but they're very specific years.
Totally. Two paintings that also use this technique — the two that impacted me the most, really — are “Hoova' Park Stroll” & “The Third Shift.” Both are special because any born-&-raised Angeleno will immediately recognize the imagery & the colors & the paraphernalia, the shadows of sneakers — it’s the presence of the LA culture, particularly the Lakers. So I do want to ask about the Lakers — not in a what-do-you-think-about-Bronny way — but in a nostalgic way. Because when I think about the Lakers, I think about the Lakers of my childhood, which I perceived as a very golden time for the city.
Oh, same here. That's the reason why the Lakers are such a big thing in my paintings, in my whole DNA. I was ten, eleven, & twelve when they were three-peating. Right before I became a teenager, I could not not be a Lakers fan. We were winning every year, our city was on top of the country. It was an amazing time to be alive. I remember the parades very well, like I remember everything about those times, & it was very magical & it really enhanced the pride that I have for this city. I grew up playing ball a lot also. So I always reference basketball, & definitely Kobe — our superman.
Absolutely. & of course these paintings are contextualized by the totally insurmountable loss of Kobe, but they also seem nostalgic in many ways. I just sort of wonder what you think about nostalgia in your paintings: in your paintings, sometimes nostalgia feels like coming home. It’s glowing & it's warm.
Right. But there definitely is a contradiction there, or a contrast I'm trying to play with. Yes, these are nostalgic events, yes, these look like very friendly activities, but they’re also scenarios that I’m constructing. So [“Hoova' Park Stroll”] is two of me. It's two self portraits, & one of them is me as a child, & one of them is me at my current age. I'm trying to make you think of two different life stages.
I want to talk a little bit about the postures of these two figures — the older version appears to be reaching for the younger version, but the younger version is looking off into the distance. What were you trying to do with this sort of body language, & what does it mean to you?
I'm trying to take the hand of my child self & guide him through a very active environment, where a lot of things happen, you know? But it’s also that the environment hasn't really changed. My idea of it might have changed, but it still feels like living in the same sort of time frame. A lot of the parks still feel the same in my neighborhood. I’m getting older but it's still kind of like the same cycle.
Interesting. This painting is my favorite of the show also because the more you look, the more there is to see. The gel transfer work underneath the calves of the older figure is really compelling. Those images, the blood on the concrete, the chalked silhouette pretty directly speak to the violence that your family experienced, or that you experienced, if even indirectly. Do you think there’s a way to move forward from the violence of the environment even if the environment feels like it’s the same?
Yeah. I mean, I still hold pride for this city as being my home. I think I impose optimism with color, because I don't want my paintings to feel threatening. There are ghostly aspects of reality, & unchanging aspects of reality, but there’s also optimism about reality.
I think that’s really smart, because often it seems to me that nostalgia is incompatible with reality. But in your paintings, the two exist at once.
Yeah. And it's easy to make a visual of violence very literal, like, I could put a handgun there. But it's important to dig up symbols that still speak of the reality in a more subtle way. I like the idea that you have to dig a little bit, like you have to dig past the very beautiful color palette & the kids, & then you find the ideas, you know?
Yeah. In a lot of ways, I do feel that's how LA works. It's a very sensory city. It's a city that is visually heightened & overwhelming in the American imagination. But anyone who grew up in LA also knows how to look past it, to see through it. Ok, I’d love to talk a bit about “The Third Shift” now.
Yeah. I think of this one as paying homage to my parents’ sacrifice. As a kid, I don't think I fully understood them until I became an adult, & I started to have to work & provide for myself. I called it “The Third Shift” because it's like taking a nap before going to work, & working all day. It reflects the labor-intensive lifestyle that my parents led to try to provide for us, you know? It's like me situating myself in that sort of feeling. Because now I fully understand what it was. But it took a long time.
And the kids’ shoes are pretty known street shoes, like Cortezes or shell-toe Adidas or the LA Gear shoes; & then obviously I'm always gonna reference the Lakers with the shorts.
I love the way perspective works here — this painting is possibly the most disorienting to look at out of the show. What was the thinking behind this top-down, skewed, distended point of view?
You're right: this is the one that forces you to see in the weirdest way. For the most part I don't always push for space to make a ton of sense — because space is about memory, & memory becomes distorted. So I don't want to ground you fully in something very readable, or something too photorealistic. I want you to feel that disorienting feeling of a memory. Memories aren’t photorealistic, they're not extremely concrete. Once we experience something, then it starts to get distorted.
Exactly. While we’re here talking about nostalgia, & memory, & the Lakers, I wonder how much of LA culture you think is rooted in things that have already happened. Like, do you think that the great moments of Los Angeles culture are all already over?
I don't know. The city still feels in flux. I left LA for three years & I came back & it feels like it's going through a different change right now. I like to tap into historic events just because I have a strong interest in what made LA what it is. So in some way I'm always looking back.
And I'm not saying that these moments that we're living now aren't interesting. But it takes a little bit of time to get past it & process it before you can kind of work with it. LA is still a city that's like growing, that’s becoming something else. I don't know. I think it’s about preserving the past, or having it at least archived in my paintings.
Yes. Your paintings are an excellent archive, & an effective archive, because you have historical markers — evidence of the historical record, of what actually happened — but also of how it felt. So. Congratulations again on a great show. I feel so happy to have caught it.
I'm so glad that you were there.
"Recess" is showing at Lyles & King until August 3, 2024. All images courtesy of Lyles & King.
Karissa Ho is a writer and visual designer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Red Ogre Review, Flash Frog, Radar Poetry, and JMWW. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she studies English literature and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a very fast walker.
Elmer Guevara (b.1990) was born and raised in Los Angeles. In the 1980’s, his parents fled a war-torn El Salvador finding refuge in the City of Angels. Along with South Central’s vibrant energy and the culture his parents brought with them, he became inspired to reflect on his upbringing and the hybridity of cultures. He often constructs narratives by sampling family photos from his youth, reframing compositions that form dialogue about identity and intergenerational trauma.
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