Kaleidoscopic No. 29: Salomon Huerta
A chat between friends..
Leonardo Bravo:
This is Leonardo and I'm here with a dear friend, Salomon Huerta, and we're doing an interview for Kaleidoscopic Projects. I am so happy to have this time to chat with you and a more formal conversation of your work. We've known each other for a while now. I think we met back in 2009 when I had first started Big City Forum in LA. So it's a real treat and I'm glad we can do this and get it out into the world.
Salomon Huerta:
Yeah, I'm really happy to be doing this so let's see what opens up <laughs>
Leonardo Bravo:
Just to start with a very general sense on how you frame your painting practice.
Salomon Huerta:
When you say my practice, you mean like how I start to?
Leonardo Bravo:
More like you as an artist, as a painter. Like how you define the work that you do.
Salomon Huerta:
I define myself as a realist painter. In the beginning a lot of my work was very much focused on portraits, like figurative work. But I did not wanna to be recognized as just a portrait artist. So I made conscious choices to get away from the portraits and also do still lifes and landscapes, but I ultimate see myself as a figurative painter. But I don't want to be labeled just a portrait painter,
Salomon Huerta:
Or maybe the way to go is just to be labeled a painter.
Leonardo Bravo:
Right!
Salomon Huerta:
I like that better.
Leonardo Bravo:
Absolutely. Let's start with the most recent work that you showed here at Harper's gallery in New York, which I went to see, a set of stunning pool paintings. What made you get into that body of work?
Salomon Huerta:
Well, what happened is that I always look for non figurative images that I can explore. And I was thinking about when at the age of like 15 to 18, my dad would take me to Malibu from living in the projects as we were doing day laboring. So we would go to a gas station by Zuma Beach at seven in the morning and people would come by and pick you up, and just point, I don't know how these people would decide who they wanted. But they would point like, I want you, I want you, and you get in their car, you don't talk, and then you go to their house and then they just tell you what they want. So, my thing back then, I was cleaning a lot of swimming pools. So that was my first experience of seeing a swimming pool other than a public pool.
Leonardo Bravo:
Which is a whole different thing. Right? <Laughs>.
Salomon Huerta:
Yeah. It was. I mean, the thing about the swimming pools is that because I was there in the morning, they were very empty. They were empty and kind of lonely. And they just looked like they were not being used. But they were dirty with leaves and other debris, whatever. So I had to learn how to clean them, I'm not a pool cleaner, but the guy would say, there's the net, there's the filter, turn it on, whatever. He was telling me what to do, and I learned how to clean 'em. So thirty years later, here I am making paintings about that. And I posted some on Instagram in 2016, and my dealer Harper from Harper's Gallery, he saw them. He goes, can we have a show on this? And right away I was like, oh, yeah, that'd be fun. But I wanted to enhance them, making them a little more beautiful, a little more kind of like surreal. And everyone was asking me questions, how come they look lonely, or there's like no one there? And right away I would tell people, look, I'm not lonely. <laughs>.
Salomon Huerta:
And there’s just no one there because that was my experience.
Leonardo Bravo:
I think this is something that carries over across your body of work and the various subject matter. There's a quality that you have as an artist that you're able to arrest time or find that quiet moment. Those quiet moments charged with meaning. And the quality that carries through is that you have such a great power of observation. There's something about the work that's always expressing something beyond the image, like these beautiful pools and as you're talking about your personal experience, it's the story of the American dream or the affluence of the American dream. Yeah. What it means to have a pool in Malibu or in Zuma Beach.
Leonardo Bravo:
But also what it means to rely on labor, working class labor, brown people to support and keep that sparkling American dream. And going back to these images, they're powerful because you capture these moments that there's so much you can read into them. You know, there's mystery. There might be loneliness, there might be emptiness. And maybe you as an artist, as a painter don't think about that but you open up these spaces that you're kind of asking the viewer to fill in. What do you think on that take?
Salomon Huerta:
Yeah, yeah. You know, my thing is, before I moved into the housing projects around the age of nine.
Leonardo Bravo:
And that was Ramona Gardens, right?
Salomon Huerta:
Yeah. The infamous Ramona Gardens housing projects. I saw myself as just like a little average kid having fun. And then when I started to see all this violence around me and all this madness I went from fully interacting as a kid in the environment to just observing. So I started to observe at a very young age. So I think that observation and that like stepping back naturally flows into my work. Because I look at everything that I do in the majority is like looking at it from a distance.
Salomon Huerta:
No matter what I paint or how, whether it is a gang member or a swimming pool, I try to make it as beautiful as I can. Because I want the viewer to feel welcome and to step into it. And I like small paintings because I can make them intimate and welcoming and it makes it easy for the subject matter that I'm choosing. A lot of people, when they see me at the opening or at a party, everyone says the same thing. Oh, you give out this vibe that it’s okay to go up to you and talk to you. So I kind of like the same thing in my work. I make it so that it's inviting or it's welcoming. The way I present myself, I'm very comfortable with myself, with who I am. And in the art world, there's no violence. So it's good to just be comfortable dropping my guard. That's the first thing that I noticed when I came into the art world, the art scene. Oh my God, there's no violence here. <laughs>
Leonardo Bravo:
<laughs>
Salomon Huerta:
So I naturally just drop my guard and make it easy for people to approach me.
Leonardo Bravo:
That's so interesting man. What you're talking about, observing things from a distance, that's something I know very well as an immigrant as well. I came to the United States when I was 12, close to 13 years old. And that sense of being in a different culture, different language, different ways of being and I had to observe from a place of distance because I could never be of it. I didn't have the tools, first of all the language and to have that natural sense of presence. So always being back a little bit to observe what was going on in order to figure out survival mechanisms of how to be in a place and feel that you can be part of it or get through it <laughs>.
Salomon Huerta:
Yeah. Let’s say for you it was to understand how you can be a part of it. And then for me, in some ways it was a little bit of the same. Like, how can I exist in this environment?
Salomon Huerta:
Because the violence that I was, uh, witnessing, it forced me to step back. Because you just can't let go of this endless cycle of violence and then you're gonna become a product, I mean, a victim of that.
Salomon Huerta:
But I think, those experiences they helped my painting. And they helped on how I approached painting. Where if I see something that I like, I look at it and I'm not looking at it in the same way that I was looking at this violence, but I'm observing with the same intensity, like really intense. How can I make use of this? How can I apply this to my art?
Leonardo Bravo:
I think I've shared this with you before, but you had mentioned to me that you're going to Italy next year for your honeymoon. But if there's a chance you can get to Bologna to go see the Giorgio Morandi Museum.
Salomon Huerta:
He has a museum over there?
Leonardo Bravo:
Yeah. And they preserve his actual studio where he used to paint. And man, it's like a religious experience. I mean, if you like Morandi, and you and I have talked about his work before.
Leonardo Bravo:
And I feel you share that same quality of observation with Morandi. He had that ability to really pause, pause and observe and capture these subtle shifts. I think about your gun paintings where there's obviously the symbolism of that object, the gun is so powerful. But then you start observing the relationships of color, the relationships of the objects, and especially since these are so intimate, like Morandi's paintings are so intimate, and you start noticing like the spaces, or why that space between this and that.
Salomon Huerta:
I love Morandi and I follow and admire his work. I saw a show of his that Michael Kohn had at his gallery in Hollywood. But I think as you're talking about that, noticing the little nuances, yeah I think about that, I think about like in the projects, the energy was so low, <laughs>, 'cause they will go quickly from a low energy to a high energy of violence. Yeah. But the energy was so low, not in a relaxing way, more like in a no life kind of way. <laughs>
Salomon Huerta:
I just came back from Oaxaca and the energy there is so peaceful, which is different, you know? It's so peaceful and nurturing. But in the projects, it was not nurturing, nor was it peaceful. It was just quiet, kind of like a dead zone. But that energy of like slowing down and stepping back, as a little kid, I had a lot of moments of just looking at things, trying to understand these things. And that carried over as an artist where I would like look at things differently.
Leonardo Bravo:
Tell me a little bit about your color choices. Not to get too much into the work, but I was looking at some images of the pool series where you have these beautiful purples and kind of deep greens and turquoises. Then in the gun series there's more of the umbers and also some purples, but more magenta, and then mixed in with these beautiful siennas and oranges. How do you go about making those choices? And I ask you, because I also saw something you had on Instagram where you showed one of the gun paintings in contrast with an image from a fashion photo layout. And where you pointed out there's a relationship betwen these two.
Salomon Huerta:
But that's exactly where I get my colors. I get my colors from fashion <laughs>. But what happened is when I did the back of the heads and the standing figures and the houses in the beginning of my paintings they were pretty muted, the way colors look when things are overcast. And I think that's how I see things. Something that happened when I got invited to the Whitney Biennial, I asked one of the curators, who else is in the show? And they mentioned Kurt Kauper and other figurative painters who paint with more intense colors. And right away I looked at my paintings, I said, oh I'm gonna be ignored. Because their palettes are more intense than mine. So I did a whole new set of paintings just for the Whitney, so that I can compete with these other painters. So I get my color palettes from fashion magazines. I buy high-end fashion magazines. Like the European ones, the thick ones.
Leonardo Bravo:
The fashion editorials are great in those.
Salomon Huerta:
Yeah, the ones that cost like $25 to $45 and they have amazing color layouts with better than any color choices than what any other artist is doing out there. Because I've never seen a painter use colors the way these fashion art directors use color. I've never seen that. So I look at these colors, and then I look at my image, and then I say, okay, there's the pool, there's the sky, there's the water, there's the shadow. And I move colors around. So when you saw that gun painting with that fashion model I literally grabbed the colors from that layout and I applied it to my gun painting.
Leonardo Bravo:
It is interesting to think about the intensities of color that you use. It makes me think about your luchadores paintings and the MMA fighters, the boxers. Like the way you capture blood running down the faces which enhances the distortion and the intensity. I mean, there's almost like a Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud feeling or connection to these works.
Salomon Huerta:
You know, I love Francis Bacon and I love those guys. I look at some older painters that I know, and my friends talking about them..well, you know, their best work was in their twenties. And I say to myself, well, I think you should be getting better as you’re aging. I really think so, because I'm really pushing myself, like with the swimming pools. I only did three before I did the whole show with Harper before that. And then when they gave me the go ahead for the show I think they gave me like eight months or nine months. But the studio was not gonna be available so I only had, I don't know, like six months to complete the whole body of work, but I only went into the studio once a week and cranked out a painting once a week. Wow.
Leonardo Bravo:
Wow indeed!
Leonardo Bravo:
I mean at this point in your life, you got the chops. You know what the paint is gonna do, you know what the medium is gonna do, you know how long it takes to dry. You have that vast body of knowledge by now.
Salomon Huerta:
Yeah. I understand those things.
Leonardo Bravo:
Also just to think about also your broad approach to subject matter. Like, the Luchadores series and then all these amazing images, such as I'm the proud owner of a Jimi Hendrix painting, and these celebrity pop culture imagery of the sixties, seventies, the rock world, and then, alongside that the quietness of the gun paintings and the homeboys and homegirls. How do you decide how you focus into a subject matter? Or do you feel you can pull from at different points and they're always available to you?
Salomon Huerta:
Yeah exactly what you said. I am looking for ideas. I'm looking for images and I'm looking for what I can relate to and then I find these subject matters and then I do a couple and then move on to something else. I do like a mini-series of them so the gallery can have choices. I had a studio visit with the gallery before I had the show with Harper's, and I had the gang members up and I had the gun paintings, and I had one more thing, one more, I forgot what it was. And the gallery came in and said, I don't like this. I don't like that, but I like the guns. So I just wanna give them proper choices.
Salomon Huerta:
And then once they say, I want that, then I figure out, well, how many paintings do you need, how big is your space? I look at the space and then I do a body of work. Right now I'm looking for an LA gallery so I can keep Harper's in New York. And I'm gonna do three bodies of work so the gallery can have choices. And I don't take it personal, if they go in there and say I don't like this, I don't like that, well it's ok because what they don't like someone else will like. Absolutely.
Leonardo Bravo:
Absolutely and very pragmatic.
Salomon Huerta:
Never take it personal. And I never get upset at the end, you know? Because if they cannot relate to it and they're not excited about it, they're not gonna be able to sell it.
Leonardo Bravo:
I was remembering that when I last went to your studio you were working on the gang members but you were also working on a David Bowie painting that I love so much. I love the way you do Bowie, man, <laughs>, you have such a nice touch about him.
Salomon Huerta:
I paint Bowie a lot because the guy, I think, he was really ahead of his time. And he has a lot of presence and his face is really interesting and he's an interesting person to paint. And every time I paint him it comes out totally different <laughs>. But I do the majority of my work small so that I cannot spend too much money on materials and I can get the idea out really quick. So if someone is interested then I can move on to something bigger or a body of work. But whatever I choose to paint, everything is based from what I can relate to from my past. Or something that I'm interested. So like Bowie, David Bowie was just someone that was very ahead of his time, that's all.
Leonardo Bravo:
Yeah. Captivating and iconic too. Let's talk a little bit about influences. I mean, obviously I was reading a couple of articles that you speak about Manet and can definitely see that. And we talked a little bit about Morandi. I wanted to ask you if you think much about the Mexican muralists and especially I see a lot of Siqueiros and Orozco., And especially that incredible painting that you have at your sister's house in Van Nuys The one of you and your brothers in a wild pig hunt.
Salomon Huerta:
Oh no. I'm not posing in that painting though.
Leonardo Bravo:
You're not? <Laughs>
Salomon Huerta:
I'll send you an image of that painting. Yeah. But I'm not posing in that. There's my brother's friends, the gang members. And it's a painting of Rubens and I just took out the hunters and put the gang members in, and in the original they were hunting a hog and I put in a pig to represent the cops because it was done during the Rodney King beating in LA.
Leonardo Bravo:
Every time I've seen that painting it makes me think of these incredible murals by Orozco in Guanajato.
Salomon Huerta:
Yeah. Orozco is amazing.
Salomon Huerta:
Of all the Mexican painters I'm inspired mainly by Orozco and Frida Kahlo.
Salomon Huerta:
Diego Rivera at one point but not anymore. And Rufino Tamayo sometimes because of his color choices. But I liked the roundness and the roughness of Orozco. And I love Frida, how she's incredibly surreal. And the one artist that recently passed away, I love his work is Francisco Toledo from Oaxaca. He passed away I think like four or five years ago. But I was able to see him a couple times in Oaxaca. I never bothered him. I never approached him because I didn't wanna bother him. But I saw him and I saw a lot of his work in person. And dealers that would exhibit his work would show it to me before they would frame it or exhibit it. And I would look at his work and I would say to myself -- it's timeless and it transcends, it has life. I can feel the presence of what he's doing. So I was like, how do the paintings do that?
Leonardo Bravo:
Going back to you personal stories in your work and I'm sure these can sometimes carry some real emotional pain, but by bringing this forth in the work, does it feel like an opportunity to kind of put it out into the world and perhaps brings it together for you a little bit?
Salomon Huerta:
I just think they're really good stories. Yeah.
Salomon Huerta:
So I believe that they're good stories. I once went to a party in Brentwood with all these collectors and I was the only artist. And I met this collector and showed him the gun painting. He goes, oh, I'm not interested in the gun paintings. I'm not interested in having a painting of a gun in my house. And I said, let me tell you the story. So I told him how I would bring snacks to my dad and put it next to the gun at the end of his work day. I told him the whole story. And when he heard the story, he goes, okay, I want it. So, because he realized that it wasn't really about the gun at all. Yeah it's not about the gun. The gun really did not exist for me. What existed for me was that I could remember me bringing snacks to my dad and placing it near the gun. It was more about the ritual, about bringing the snacks and how those snacks interacted with the object in that moment. Which just happens to be a gun.
Leonardo Bravo:
That's the beauty of it Salomon, is that it's ultimately about a very gentle gesture. You know, a son bringing something to his father at the end of the work day when the father's tired. And that juxtaposition with gentleness and softness, with the charged symbolism of a gun, is what's so powerful about these paintings.
Salomon Huerta:
Yeah. Because I paint my subject matter depending on how it needs to be expressed. And then I choose stories that I feel are interesting and people can enjoy because I think it's all about the story or the concept, whether it's a good conceptual idea or a good story. Everyone just wants either a good idea, a good story, or at the end of the day they want to see an image that inspires them or takes them to a whole other place.
Leonardo Bravo:
So what's coming up for you next? What's inspiring you to do something new?
Salomon Huerta:
I have no inspiration <laughs>.
Leonardo Bravo:
<laughs> Man you're married now and you're going on a honeymoon. Come on, you can' tell me you're not inspired!
Salomon Huerta:
Well yes, Anna and I went to the Huntington Library and Gardens recently.
Salomon Huerta:
And seeing these beautiful gardens all I can think about is how in the hell did they put everything together? The design of the gardens, the landscape, etc. So we took all these pictures then she suggested, why don't you do a painting of one of the sculptures in the garden?
Leonardo Bravo:
Yes, those are great.
Salomon Huerta:
So I did one, and it came out really cool. And then I decided, I'm gonna look for more sculptures. Whether it be at the Norton Simon Museum or LACMA, wherever I can find them with gardens and enhance them. I'm not sure what I'm gonna be talking about with these or what it's going to lead to because many times I just like to get started and then see where it goes. And then it starts to unfold as to what I'm trying to say. The more I paint the more I start to realize, well, this is what I wanna say. When I did the back of the heads, the back of the heads were very simple. My idea was to challenge myself in portraiture, and I wanted to do a portrait of something that I hadn't seen before. So it was very simple. It was just a portrait but with another angle on how to view it. So I like doing simple ideas that I can go into and expand them.
Leonardo Bravo:
When you say simple, I think that's the power of your work Salomon, is that even thinking about those heads, I mean, yeah, there's a pure simplicity…
Salomon Huerta:
It's very simple. It's very simple.
Leonardo Bravo:
But in that simplicity lies everything. You've talked about not wanting to be pegged as a Latino artist or those expectations of your work having to express that. And in thinking about the heads, just that gesture of turning back to the viewer in terms of the history of figuration and classical portraiture. But there's also such a power because the same as with the gun paintings, same as with the pools, there's a mystery that you achieve in the work. There's something in the works that it's kind of unexpressed that pulls the viewer in. And maybe it's that invitation that you're talking about so there's a compelling mystery or something that's not being expressed that pulls you into the work, which I think manifests all across your subjects.
Salomon Huerta:
Well when you're painting, however you feel about something it's ultimately gonna come out in your work, at least for me that’s how it happens.
Salomon Huerta:
Even if you're a conceptual artist. You can look at conceptual work. Some of it is very uplifting and some of it is a little heavy. But it can still be a very inspiring idea. So whatever I'm going through, whatever issue that I have when I'm painting, I go in deep and whatever I feel, whether it is sadness or whatever, it comes out in the work...I allow it to come out. But then I make it as beautiful as I can. So then you have this kind of complexity of things going on that people can relate to. But the whole thing for me is make it welcoming. Make it so that people wanna stop and look at it. Make it beautiful but make it so that it's complex.
Salomon Huerta:
I was very lucky early on, I got a lot of support from older artists. Like Ed Ruscha, he invited me to do a print at his studio and Ed Moses he was very friendly. I got to meet Cy Twombly when I was with Gagosian and he was very generous and friendly. So they all gave me a lot of support which allowed me to feel kind of comfortable to just be myself.And not try to be someone or something different, but be myself and that's the one thing that inspires me the most.
Leonardo Bravo:
You've had such and incredible arc to your career and you've been at it for a while, but it's beautiful to hear that you're still inspired and still inspired by the art world. You're still fully part of it and things still fascinate you and inspire you and push you, so that's great.
Salomon Huerta:
And it's fun. You know, I have a lot of fun, like in the last year and a half, I've had three shows. The gun show was in Chelsea, the gang members in the Hamptons, and the swimming pools in Chelsea. That's in one year and a half. I was very lucky that Harper's was open to doing that.
Leonardo Bravo:
I wanted asked you this, but what was the reaction to the homeboys and homegirls in the Hamptons?
Salomon Huerta:
Well, they didn't tell me anything. People were just observing, but they told Anna, you know she's Mexicana, they were like, are you in the paintings? <laughs> Where are you in the paintings?
Leonardo Bravo:
<laughs>
Salomon Huerta:
But it was very fun going there, because I don't think that's ever gonna happen again where you see gang members in the Hamptons. I think if I have another show at the Hamptons it's gonna be something that will be more relatable to the environment.
Leonardo Bravo:
This has been so great to have nice chat and catch up about the work. We've known each other for a more than a minute now and look forward to seeing you next time I'm in LA, perhaps in September.
Salomon Huerta:
Yeah. Well, let's do it. We'll do it. We we can have a dinner in my studio, just bring out some tables and chairs and have a dinner there if you want.
Leonardo Bravo:
Beautiful, man. Yeah, that'd be great. We'll do that and bring a crew together. Alright brother, this has been so good and I appreciate you deeply.
For more information:
https://www.harpersgallery.com/exhibitions/salomon-huerta3#tab:slideshow
IG: @salomonhuerta