Sayre Gomez’s Hyperrealistic Paintings Capture the Grit of Urban L.A.

As a young man, Sayre Gomez worked in a photo lab. This job offered Gomez—who was studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—a rare vantage point from which he could observe the city. There, he witnessed city life through strangers’ eyes, and these unfiltered images stuck with Gomez, sparking his love for scenes of urban decay. Over the years, he began collecting photographs—both found and taken by himself—to compile an archive that would later lay the foundation for his approach to painting, often photorealistic yet semi-fictionalized cityscapes.

Then, in 2006, Gomez moved to Los Angeles for his MFA at CalArts, and has called the city home ever since. “This place is wild,” Gomez said of the city. “I’ve been here almost 20 years, and I’m still astonished pretty regularly.” His paintings, rapidly influenced by Southern California’s urban sprawl, synthesize images from his archive, his personal experiences, and, more recently, the catalog of Adobe Stock to portray the underbelly of contemporary life. In fact, his canvases often evoke ruinous byproducts of capitalism. Burnt-out cars, industrial machines, garbage piles, and flaming shopping carts: These motifs are all prominently featured in Gomez’s “Heaven ‘N’ Earth,” on view at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels until March 2nd.

The show’s title reflects the viewer’s journey from “heaven” to “Earth” with works distributed across the gallery’s four floors, as experienced by descending from the top level. Beneath a skylight, the top level features the mixed-media sculpture Scale Replica of the Past, Present, and Future (Peabody Werden House) (2023), a diorama of a boarded-up white house, which is presented among several luminous sunset paintings—a juxtaposition of historical decay with idealized backdrops. The gallery’s lower levels feature Gomez’s photorealistic paintings, known as “X-Scapes”—paintings of material degradation across urban Los Angeles executed with trompe l’oeil, using airbrush, stencils, and other methods typical of Hollywood set painting.

Gomez often manipulates these urban scenes to emphasize their uncanny contradictions. His painting Progress Maker (2023) depicts a massive, ominous “cold milling machine” blocking a pristine landscape of Los Angeles and the light purple San Bernardino Mountains. Free from smog and pollution, the dreamlike, glowing cityscape appears out of reach—just beyond the industrial megalith. This sharp contradiction is crucial to Gomez’s work, a comment on the disparities between L.A.’s glamorous image and its gritty reality. In turn, the artist hopes to instigate a more truthful understanding of the world.

“We see the world through a pretty complex system of ciphers, and even in our daily experience, we see through the photos that we take, through the maps that we’re looking at, and through the stream of images that are constantly flooding our experience,” Gomez said. “We all know that in some way, but I think you lose sight of it.…It’s somehow more meaningful, more truthful. It’s like that Picasso quote, the lie that tells the truth. It becomes more revealing that way.”

His 2023 painting We Pay Cash, which shows a burnt-out car surrounded by trash in front of the L.A. skyline, symbolizes the chaotic remnants of public life in late capitalism. But more notably, it features a stack of signs on the left of the painting, including ads for the stimulant Kratom or “Fast Divorce.” Here, Gomez cheekily manipulates these photorealistic scenes, superimposing details and objects that test the image’s authenticity. By playing with reality, he highlights the ease with which information can be distorted by digital culture.

“The photograph doesn’t hold the same credibility that it once did,” Gomez said. “First, with Photoshop…a photo can be completely manipulated within seconds. That’s relatively new for the general public to understand. Now with AI, people are like, ‘Could be real, could not be, but I don’t know.’ People are just accepting that now.”

The 42-year-old painter is now a father of two, beginning this new chapter in 2020 as the pandemic unraveled. Today, Gomez thinks of his children as his biggest inspirations. While the themes and subjects of his paintings have not changed drastically in the last four years, his approach to these ideas and issues has evolved with his children in mind, taking a more practical perspective to the issues plaguing contemporary society.

“The things that I used to find fascinating and titillating, it became a lot less sensational,” said Gomez. “Now, here is another thing I have to learn how to deal with in a more realistic way: How am I going to talk to [my kids] about this? Or how is this going to be in our lives? I mean, it’s really crazy—being a dad right now or a parent right now is pretty nuts.”