A full-color catalogue with an essay by Chris Ware. Accompanies an exhibition at Hackett-Freedman Gallery.

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Essay by Chris Ware

Okay, full disclosure: Marc Trujillo and I attended the University of Texas together in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, not only has his work endured as a regular source of interest and inspiration to me but he's also remained a close friend, one whose artistic insight and advice has more than once had a significant effect on me. As such, this catalog essay (which by all rights should be penned by an art historian or qualified professional) is likely to be tainted by a small share of idiosyncratic reminiscence that the reader can either discount or gloss over; I'm afraid I have a difficult time sorting it all out myself, unfortunately. There are people one meets in life, who, by their example, make one question (and even regret) one's own career choices. For me, Marc is one of those people.

Marc has been making highly approachable and radiant paintings of apparently unremarkable interiors and exteriors for almost two decades now. I still remember his early undergraduate canvases of a local Austin ice cream stand and an array of interiors and figures glimpsed through windows as being daring and confrontational images when he first hung them up for our class critiques. The younger reader (or a reader who's found him- or herself delightfully free of the odd mental gymnastics of modern art education) might be somewhat baffled by this statement: really, what could be so daring about a painting of an ice cream stand? To this, I ask for a certain measure of sympathy: During the time that Marc and I attended college, the Byzantine pyrotechnics of postmodern “theory” used to justify bad artwork had reached their apex (or nadir, depending on one's perspective). With rare exception, we were advised to think before we looked, talk before we acted, and to dismiss anything that was remotely appealing to the eye or to the emotions as sentimental or, even worse, “illustrative.”1 Actual imagery in paintings was only acceptable if recast or reframed by some visual excuse, either by eliminating edges, painting it ineptly, or by layering it together in a mixmastered mishmash. Thus, to paint a simple and direct “this is what I saw” painting was either the naïve purview of the few middle-aged students who had raised their children and were returning to art school, or the work of someone who had considered and become disillusioned by the guidance that she or he was being proffered in class. Needless to say, Marc fell into the latter category. Simply by hanging up these directly observed works he forced us to talk about the pictures as pictures, not as an assemblage of marks or an object that made one reconsider one's sexuality or “the space of the gallery.” As a result, it was always a relief and a wonderfully freeing conversation when it came time to talk about Marc's paintings.

For graduate school Marc attended Yale University, an institution certainly not lax in its intellectual rigor. For lack of any better place, I should mention here that Marc is an extraordinarily clever and astute person, quick with retorts that sometimes not only softly fold over upon themselves but also neatly sew up and gently disarm an objection with the same fluidity one might expect from a trained police officer hypnotizing his adversary into surrendering a weapon.2 This trait is not, however, any indication of an inherent coldness or pleasure in inciting verbal sparring, but rather it represents the thoughtfulness and seriousness with which he's approached his work over the years. While at Yale, Marc developed a solid body of work and a philosophy of painting not by limiting himself to a narrow visual palette or subject, but by painting New Haven and the campus - the surroundings of his own life - crisply, clearly, and democratically, from backyards to classrooms to movie theaters.

From my above description of undergraduate school, it should be clear that to develop one's eye rather than one's so-called iconography is an unusual choice in today's art world; in the simplest of terms, Marc was expanding his boundaries, rather than limiting them. Following Yale, he moved to Brooklyn and then to a town in New Jersey just west of Manhattan, which afforded him regular trips to the museums, his favorite being the Frick, where I passed a particularly memorable afternoon with him opening my eyes to the perspicacious techniques and approaches of two or more preceding generations of painters. I especially recall the better part of half an hour spent standing in front of Vermeer's Girl Asleep at a Table (c. 1657) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, marveling with Marc at the painting's utter lack of stylization and prevarication. Vermeer's straightforward, almost banal, presentation and awkward composition produce an effect of genuine timelessness. From the torn foreground chair to the afternoon light reflected on the dusty floor behind the open door to the disquieting alien hairstyle of the girl dozing at the table, one senses in visceral, almost horrible, flashes what it might've felt like to actually be alive in 17th-century Holland. We decided together that for its very quotidian lucidity, it was one of the most powerful paintings, if not the most powerful, in the museum.

I think this same quality of “lucid horror” has always been present in Marc's work and has emerged more clearly since he's lived in and made Los Angeles the subject of his paintings. But this quality is not a “message,” however, any more than a poet has a message, for Marc has been able to achieve that rare balance of presentation and commentary to which all artists should aim: The same tone of blank inevitability by which the world, in its unjudgmental, apathetic indifference, simply exists. So-called “contemporary realism” is thickly spread with paintings and drawings that seek, by their overstylized, overthought, and overwrought imagery to define themselves with an awkward eagerness like that of a teenager, who, in order to appear as grown-up as possible, affects cigarettes or applies too much makeup. Marc's general subject matter, as well as his technique, carries a remarkable lack of editorializing, re-presenting the genuinely strange world in which our lives are increasingly unfolding. In short, Marc's paintings neither lecture nor instruct; they show. Someone who is concerned with the West's cosmetically concealed appetite for natural resources can see that monstrous truth reflected in Marc's images of glaringly lit shopping malls and grocery stores, just as easily as the corporations whose attentiveness to customer service also figure as his frequent subject matter. (Target and Radio Shack are both owners of Trujillo originals.)

I'm hesitant to consider the actual nuts and bolts imagery of Marc's work, not only because it is unnecessary (see the following pages and use your own eyes for that) but also because I'm loath to sway the viewer's mind with any didactic or academic approach. Seen in reproduction, however, Marc's paintings are so immediately “real” that one might be tempted to label him with the unfortunate moniker “photorealistic.” This term isn't appropriate. While Marc collects and employs some photo reference for his work, his compositions are entirely the work of observation, both analytic and synthetic, and conscientiously orchestrated to ladle out a larger dollop of time and light than any single frozen photograph might measure. Starting with a number of compositional and color studies and moving on to a black and white value sketch (or “grisaille), the finished work is the culmination of weeks and months of careful consideration of the corners, contrasts, and colors of a particular place. Marc's process reminds me of Fritz Lang's edict to his production staff that “nothing gets into this film by accident.” Even more importantly, Marc's reconstitution of the ever-increasing myriad of light sources his images embrace would simply not be possible in the flat snap of a single camera shot.

To me, it is the depiction of light that is really the lasting, defining, and continuous tissue binding together all of Marc's work. Never before has a generation experienced more multifarious variations upon the spectrum of visible light than ours. Electrified gasses and filaments reveal shapes and shadows in pools of isolated color and hum that-to even understand it all, let alone paint it-seem too much to bother with. Nevertheless, this is exactly what Marc does: Not only does he adjust and calibrate the value range of his paint to admit the blinding buzz of fluorescent overheads in, say, a grocery store (see 14440 Burbank Boulevard [2006]), but he also reminds us of the shifting temperatures and tones of this artificial medium in the polished mauve linoleum, the plastic mayonnaise containers, and the shadowed paper sacks that sheathe the “French bread,” Look closely, and the blue of the exterior sky also shimmers on this same floor, but peer farther behind and you'll discover that even this sky is filtered through gray plastic shades, drawn down to shield the meandering and oddly solitary customers from the headache-inducing southern California sun. Like the sharp flashes of detail that linger from the stories of Tolstoy and John Updike, these details recall remembered truths of places that we didn't particularly notice at the time but have somehow come to a patient rest in our minds, establishing a loose association and meaning apart from the painting itself.3 Even in his exteriors, such as 18921 Wilshire Boulevard (2005), the number of light sources is almost incomprehensible, from the street lights to the backlit bus map to the interior fluorescents to the televisions to the neon in the background to the office lights in the miserable office building to, of course, the glowing, luminous blue of the post-sunset sky, which is precisely the same value of the opaque gray building itself (to say nothing of the nefarious shadows of the trees-lined up like soldiers for inspection-projected onto its stucco surface.) Somehow, the accuracy of the light renders this place, one that we've all seen somewhere before, peculiar, while the site's blind familiarity clarifies the dreadful, yet beautiful, light that fills it.

A comparison here to the work of Edward Hopper is perhaps useful: Hopper's settings in his day were, I think, more or less as intentionally transparent as Marc's now seem to us, and, like Hopper, Marc's paintings fray and reweave themselves into the textured tapestry of everyday life. As time has passed, though, a certain measure of the “lost America,” with a concomitant whiff of nostalgia for its vanished movie theaters, gas stations, and diners, has added a layer of meaning to Hopper's dramatic and staged work that was probably not as obvious when he painted them. He may have anticipated this, thinly limning his imagery in a surprisingly queasy palette of acid greens and dirty brick reds that, in person, are anything but warm or nostalgic, perhaps as a way of “bittering it up” a bit (and which, I should mention, I never realized until I traveled with Marc to Houston in 1990 to see a show of Hopper's work). I have to wonder: Will my children's generation look on Marc's lustrous, creamily rendered observations as loving memories of a forgotten, wonderful world of security exits, air-conditioning vents, and mercury vapor lamps? On the one hand, I certainly hope not, because that means whatever comes next architecturally will be even more antiseptic and ghastly than what we're tolerating now. On the other, I do know that future generations will experience some strange measure of what it really felt like to live in our time via Marc's careful, illuminating observations of these irradiated, isolated settings. The places we all go to meet our basic needs of food and clothing—the places we don't even look at or want to see - are the places in the modern world where our lives are the most bare, awkward, and vulnerable. Their enduring beauty in Marc's work is the light that determines, defines, and defies them.

Chris Ware is a writer and artist and an infrequent contributor to the New Yorker, New York Times, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

Notes:

1. Which is not, really, a bad idea, and I have nothing against what's come to be known as non-representational painting. Admittedly, most of us students grew up copying rock album jackets and comic book covers, so extreme measures were necessary to divest us of our commercial imagery-fogged brains. Even though, the “baby with the bathwater” cliché here is not un-apt.

2. As an example, Marc for many years was also a cartoonist. One of my favorite strips showed two museum patrons standing in front of a giant abstract-expressionist canvas. One of them has tracked mud into the gallery all the way up to the work itself and exclaims proudly about the painting in front of him, “See ... it's really a record of movement ... of action!” Marc's standard answer to a reader who complained about not understanding his cartoons when they appeared in the Yale student newspaper was: “Really? But that one was about you.”

3. For example, every time I look at Marc's linoleum I'm instantly a child again, shopping with my mother. For some reason, I don't experience this same sort of pocketed recollection when I look at photographs. There's something about a sense perception being painted that invites a more personal sort of experience, maybe because Marc's careful consideration of every corner of his paintings are somewhat swayed by his own memories. Anyway, I'm just guessing here, of course.

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