The Armory Show 2024
Charlie James Gallery is excited to present new works by Los Angeles-based painter Manuel López at the 2024 edition of The Armory Show. López turns to landscape for this first presentation on the East Coast, tapping into this grand and romantic tradition to capture the quiet moments and forgotten corners of his native Los Angeles. These are the artist’s largest paintings to date, yet they maintain a sense of immediacy that is honed over a series of preparatory drawings. Precise detail, an idiosyncratic hand, and a vibrant sense of play brings each composition to life. In these works, López also taps into various art historical touchpoints including romantic landscape painting and 20th century icons such as Edward Hopper and David Hockney.
The centerpiece of this presentation is the large, bustling painting El Sereno Landscape (The Place of the Flowers). The viewer is led into the composition by two towering, beautifully rendered cypress trees. These frame a vibrant working-class neighborhood, with the ever-present Los Angeles tire shop nestled beside colorful homes and apartments. Peering over the landscape is a small ranch house in the distant hills – a nod to the city’s more agricultural past, but also to its ever-changing future: a U-Haul truck ferries in the city’s newest resident, perhaps. Amid this cycle of constant renewal and displacement, López pays homage to the working class community – those who fix up old cars, care for old houses, and remember the old days. Yet the composition contains no figures, as in early photographs of bustling street scenes whose figures moved too fast for the technology to capture – the image of the figure is lost, but their energy remains.
The bristling energy of El Sereno Landscape carries over into the smaller painting Terreno con Nopales. The makeshift fencing in the foreground of the composition provides ample opportunities for López’s signature shifting perspective: in his works, a crossed fencepost, sagging telephone wire, or lanky palm trunk often occasions a spatial hiccup, bending reality to its own internal logic, or perhaps to the eternal illogic of Los Angeles’s sprawling expanse. López approaches these nopales as a connection to the culture of his ancestors, whose influence lives on through a combination of careful cultivation and stubborn resiliency, much like the cacti and dandelions that dot the landscape.
Terreno con Nopales takes its palette from David Hockney’s famous Los Angeles composition American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) (1968), in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hockney and López capture two faces of Los Angeles, mapping the distance between the glitz of Hollywood and the humble routines of the city’s more far-flung neighborhoods. López draws from art history in other works as well, evoking the eerie dusk glow and suggestively lit windows of Edward Hopper in Moonrise Over South Central. The dusty pink gloaming here comes from the polluted air left in the wake of low-flying planes, which here mingle with the LAPD helicopters that hover over these over-surveilled communities. Each of these urban landscapes captures stillness and beauty in forgotten places, finding value and resiliency in the overlooked corners of the city.
As in Terreno con Nopales, the pink-skied Nopales, Fig Tree, and Cypress takes as its subject the contained landscape of a Los Angeles empty lot. Within the grand urban landscape, these small spaces burst with mystery and possibility, amplified here by the flushed twilight sky. López toggles between bright, flat color that verges on abstraction and a more detailed hand, giving the scene an almost storybook feel. Two potted plants in the lower left serve as a kind of signature, hearkening back to the artist’s early drawings and still lifes. In focusing on landscape, López joins a robust history of artists finding magic and inspiration in the city of angels, turning a gimlet eye on its idiosyncrasies, inequalities, and endless potential.
Southwest Road Tripping breaks this pattern, taking as its subject the vast expanse of the Mojave desert landscape as seen from the highway. The painting is a story told in four registers, each moving at a different speed: the road flies by at the front, while the nearby fence breaks up the fast-moving scrub. A second, slower register of desert landscape holds telephone poles and a small structure, and finally the far mountain landscape sedately traverses the view. The subtle surreality of the scene recalls the cartoon backdrop to the antics of Wile E. Coyote and his elusive roadrunner, the artist’s first exposure to the desert. Much like that one, this landscape holds more than first meets the eye: López also breaks up the landscape vertically, offering a slightly different snapshot between each telephone pole. In this way he captures both movement in both space and time under a veneer of serenity.
THE ARMORY SHOW 2024
Venue
Javits Center
Crystal Palace Entrance
429 11th Avenue
New York, NY 10001
Fair Dates
September 5 – 8, 2024
Thursday, September 5 - VIP Preview
Friday, September 6 | 11am–7pm
Saturday, September 7 | 11am–7pm
Sunday, September 8 | 11am–6pm
Selected Works
installation
