Curated by Edward Hayes, Victor Hugo Zayas: The River Paintings is dominated by urban landscape paintings of extraordinary scale and emotional energy, according to MoLAA. Together, they constitute a time-lapse portrait of Los Angeles, made over more than two decades, each a frame recording a moment in the artist’s and the city’s evolution.
“Like any landscape artist, Zayas’s major subject is defined by place— mostly by the industrial neighborhood of warehouses, factories and railyards northeast of Downtown LA where he has long lived and worked, split by the concrete channel of the river and crisscrossed by freeways, bridges, roads, railroad tracks, and powerlines,” states a press release from MoLAA.
The paintings, selected from the LA River and Grid series, painted from 2013 to 2015, range widely and display varying degrees of representation and abstraction. They feature various effects of light and color, and they navigate a broad spectrum between expressionism and impressionism.
In compositions of trees, concrete embankments, bridges, power pylons, buildings and transportation corridors, all bathed in a vivid, changing sky, the paintings reflect the ever changing nature of the river and the city. Paint is the fundamental element: raw, confident brushstrokes and thick impasto, laid down in layers and drifts, giving the canvases a dimensional surface and an insistent materiality, according to the museum.
Zayas was born in Tijuana, Mexico and grew up in the city of Mazatlán. He moved to San Diego in 1977 as a high school student and received his BFA at the United States International University. In 1981, at the age of 18, he set off for Europe, intent on making his pilgrimage to the great repositories of Western art. He saw Velasquez and Goya at the Prado in Madrid. Elsewhere he saw Rembrandt, Titian, Whistler, Turner, Çezanne, Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Soutine— some of the artists he has cited as major influences.
Back in California, he continued his education at Art Center College of Art and Design in Pasadena, graduating with a second BFA in 1986.
Zayas let Los Angeles guide him. He took to the streets, often at night, painting nearly every bridge over the LA River from San Pedro to the confluence with the Arroyo Seco in the Glendale Narrows north of downtown.
“In increasingly evocative and strong canvases, he chronicled the fires of the Rodney King riots of 1992 when columns of black smoke from burning buildings made LA look like a volcanic plain,” states MoLAA’s press release. “In the middle of LA’s worst gang violence, the era of movies like Colors and Boyz in the Hood, Zayas practiced plein air painting, hauling large canvases to the concrete riverbank and painting in the back of a pickup truck.
This mid-career retrospective underlines the importance of Zayas’s formative artistic exploration within the context of his recent work, according to MoLAA.
The museum will also host a panel discussion related to the exhibit entitled Art & the LA River on Sunday, Dec. 6 from 3pm to 5pm in the Balboa Room.
The discussion will include perspectives from artists and individuals invested in exploring natural resources through their art and social practices. Participants include: Lauren Bon, vice president and director of the Annenberg Foundation; urbanist Norma Medina; and artist Victor Hugo Zayas. The event is organized by Edward Hayes, MOLAA curator of Exhibitions, and will be moderated by Wade Graham, author and professor of public policy at Pepperdine University. Admission is free, but space is limited. RSVP by calling (562) 437-1689.
For more information, visit molaa.org .
