interview by Jeffrey Deitch
photography by Johanna Hvidtved
Having cut his teeth as a traveling sign painter, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.’s paintings are deeply infused with the tradition of the Chicano Art Movement of Southern California and the distinct vernacular of Los Angeles’s palimpsestic urbanity. His paintings are near-spiritual windows to the vibrancy and richness of immigrant communities across the Southland. Through graffiti-covered overpasses and cement ravines, birthday party supply stores, nail salons, and helicopters circling stucco-clad multi-unit dwellings, Gonzalez Jr. reimagines art history through a diasporan lens. Photographed at a friend’s equestrian ranch in the unincorporated Avocado Heights neighborhood of the San Gabriel Valley, Gonzalez Jr. speaks to Jeffrey Deitch about his unique letterforms; inspired by pachuco and cholo traditions, his narrative approach, and observational humor.
JEFFREY DEITCH: I was impressed by how your introduction to art comes from real life. You learned by immersing yourself in graffiti and sign painting. Your knowledgecomes from perfecting the craft. Tell us more about your artistic origin story.
ALFONSO GONZALEZ JR: My father’s a sign painter. He grew up in Tijuana and moved to LA when he was about twelve years old, so he witnessed the beginning of the Chicano Art Movement. Around that time, there were hundreds of murals painted all over Los Angeles County. He moved both of my parents to the Boyle Heights area when they came to the United States, and that’s where a lot of that movement was born. Some of the first art I remember seeing was in books that he had of Mexican muralists, like [David Alfaro] Siqueiros, [José Clemente] Orozco, and a few of [Diego] Rivera. He painted a few murals when he was younger, but later became a sign painter for a lot of tow truck companies, storefronts, and things like that. I would always go with him to work, so that exposed me to different parts of the city.
Going from San Gabriel Valley to the San Fernando Valley, looking at everything in between, and watching the landscape change wasalways really fascinating to me. That was also around the time I started seeing graffiti. It was the ’90s Southern California style, but it wasn’t just an artistic style; it was also the spot selection—climbing bridges and billboards. So I began meeting people. I had a cousin who did graffiti, and he introduced me to a lot of magazines and music. He had all these sketchbooks. All of that really informs what I’m doing now. Now that I’ve found my own voice, I’m continuing that legacy.
DEITCH: There is a very distinctive Los Angeles mural and graffiti style.
GONZALEZ JR: The beautiful thing about the United States is that the immigrants create a rich culture and history that is unique to this country. For instance, Boyle Heights was a Japanese and Jewish neighborhood that later became home to Mexican immigrants. A lot of the Chicano art movement was inspired by the Mexican muralists and the printmaking that was happening in places like Oaxaca, but with a new perspective, because it’s for people born in the United States.
What we know as modern-day graffiti originated in the 1970s in New York City on the subways. But the Los Angeles landscape is different. A lot of the early graffiti movement started on the buses, and once law enforcement started cracking down on that, it moved to the highways. Artists were creating really bold styles to catch your attention at fast speeds, but when those got buffed and erased, people started climbing. Then, the thing was to paint really difficult spots in very intricate styles.
The palettes and the lettering style are also influenced by pachuco, cholo, and Chicano gang styles. There was a whole movement that used pre-aerosol paint. They used paint brushes and tar in the LA River. There are still some really old landmarks fromthe 1920s in many of these neighborhoods. Gangs like the Avenues and White Fence from the ’20s started what would later become the pachuco style. That style was a lot sharper, bolder, created to mark territory, and to be intimidating. A lot of it is inspired by Old English. It has a darker feeling to it.
DEITCH: I’ve heard that part of the inspiration comes from the Los Angeles Timesmasthead?
GONZALEZ JR: Yeah, that’s the Old English. To this day, when I see the Los Angeles Times, it just feels very serious, very gothic, almost.
DEITCH: Could you give us a better understanding of the differences in the pachuco and cholo approaches?
GONZALEZ JR: The pachuco style started around World War II, when everyone was rationing, which meant you couldn’t use a lot of material. But the pachucos were dressed in baggy clothes, and they would always clash with the sailors. There were a few fights, and the LAPD always sided with the sailors, so that’s what led to the Zoot Suit Riots. A lot of the modern Chicano gangs, which we call cholos, were basically groups of teenagers that started clubs in the ’60s and later became what we know as gangs. Sometimes it was a football team, and other times it was for protection, but a lot of the fashion came from workwear, and a lot ofthat clothing is similar to how people dress in prison. It also influenced the way people dressed in the ’80s, when streetwear started to become popular.
DEITCH: I love the story you told me about working as a traveling sign painter, going across the country. It reminded me of James Rosenquist’s background, how he turned that into his pop art. How does your experience as a sign painter inform the paintings that you show now in galleries?
GONZALEZ JR: I grew up painting signs, graffiti, and cartoons, but as far as referencing and rendering a photo, I learned that at work. The first company I worked for was based in Los Angeles, and they painted all kinds of ads—a lot of movie posters—on 12 to 20-story buildings. After working with that company, one of my mentors asked me if I would go with him to work for a company that was based out of Brooklyn.
This company was founded by ex-graffiti writers who saw the opportunity to expand what we were doing in LA—working with different creative agencies, and painting ground-level advertisements—in Manhattan and all over the country. I started off painting on suspended scaffolds, so you would view the work from hundreds offeet away. Then, eventually, once I got better, I went to the ground—stuff that is still really large-scale, but you could walk up and look at it.
It was my first time going to New York, so I met a lot of these painters who came from different backgrounds, but we had a lot of similarities. I experienced that training from the last of the old billboard painters. It was the old school apprenticeship that most people don’t have anymore. They would start at 7:00, and if you showed up at 7:01, they would go upwithout you. They’d just close the door and say, “You gotta go.” For me, that was my livelihood. I couldn’t get fired because I didn’t have any other options. You had to have thick skin because they were mean. They were trying to get you to quit. But, after a few years of that—it wasn’t days or months, it was years—they were like, “Okay, you can hang now, let me teach you.” I was like, “I don’t know anything, so you just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it, and I’ll clean your brushes.”
DEITCH: Is that when you started to go to museums?
GONZALEZ JR: After a while, I got tired of just drinking with my co-workers during my off hours, so I started going to all the museums in whatever town we were in. I would see some pop art and think, Wow, this is an advertisement. I would see works by Rosenquist, Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol’s soup cans, and it was such a breakthrough moment. And then, I started thinking about my place in it. I’m like, Hey, why don’t I do it?
Growing up, I always called myself an artist, but I didn’t really have the chops. It took making it my livelihood to get the discipline to finish things. Leaving LA was also a crucial part of my story, because you have to look at it from the outside to know what’s really going on. People always tell me things like, “Wow, you really captured this and that.” And it’s because I traveled all over the United States, then to Europe and Asia, and when I came back, all these little mundane nuances from home—the kind that are easy to ignore—started to inform my work.
DEITCH: You are one of the great artists portraying Los Angeles today. You have a lot of Los Angeles cityscapes, landscapes, and people working. So I’d like to hear about your vision of the city.
GONZALEZ JR: I have a deep appreciation and love for the city. I know it’s not perfect, and there’s a lot of stereotypes. Some of them are accurate, and some of them aren’t, but some of these stories aren’t being told, so I enjoy the opportunity to give my perspective. The thing that makes it really special here is that you can really be in the mix, or you can also hide away if you need to. There are parts that feel very urban and there are places that feel almost secluded and rural. Maybe that doesn’t make sense until you experience it.
As I was introduced to a lot of art and started thinking about these different movements, one of the things I kept thinking was, if this is what’s going in the history books, there’s still a lot of important stuff missing. So, I feel like my perspective is really just giving you a peek into what’s going on in certain pockets of LA.
DEITCH: Looking at your work, we can see that you’re very influenced by the billboards, the advertisements on the back of buses, the contrast between nature and commerce in Los Angeles neighborhoods, buildings that are well taken care of, and then junk cars.
GONZALEZ JR: Back when I was painting advertisements, I would feel conflicted with thoughts about overconsumption and the tactics they use. Whether it’s fear-mongering, hypersexualizing, or targeting particular demographics by using stereotypes. My paintings are my way of making fun of it, critiquing it, but also acknowledging that I participate in it. I look at these things every day and a lot of the time, I find it very humorous. So, I try to lean into the humor.
I feel like it’s all landscape, but my millennial brain thinks about it like the way you would navigate on Google Maps. You click on something, you zoom into it, then you back out and go around the corner, and then you’re like, Okay, I’m on La Brea right now, but what’s over here? Then you make a right, and you’re like, damn, I moved the mouse too far, and now I’m zoomed in on this dumpster. Then you back out, and there’s a lawyer billboard or something. I don’t really use Photoshop or Illustrator. Many of the things I’m referencing are documented on my iPhone, but then I crop or zoom into them.
DEITCH: Can you walk us through your whole process—from before you even get to the canvas? Does it start with taking an iPhone photo of a cityscape that you experience?
GONZALEZ JR: There’s a few different examples of how I approach a painting. The pretty straightforward way is starting with the photo. I’m always taking photos of things that I find interesting, so I look at the archive to find things I want to paint. Sometimes I see something and document it, knowing right away that I’m going to create a work out of it. But even when I do that, I take the liberty of changing the colors, simplifying things, collaging onto it in some cases. Other times, I have a specific idea about something. So, I drive around, looking to find one thing, only to end up finding something else. Other times, the work is not referencing anything; it could be built off of memory or something that I think could exist. It’s a combination of all these things. A lot of what I’m doing is built off of memory, and it’s informed by when I was painting signs, or when I was doing graffiti—I know how things would build up naturally, because the work is about other people’s decisions and how they influence and change the surface. So I’m getting into the mentality of a 13-year-old graffiti tagger who’s really angry at this other kid, like crossing them out—it’s these very aggressive gestures—or like someone who’s afraid, or it’s the conversation between a client and a sign painter about why they chose specific colors. They all begin with these little meta-narratives.
DEITCH: And my last question is: would you prefer to buy your insurance from Adriana or Veronica?
GONZALEZ JR: Well, based off the advertisements, I feel like Veronica. Adriana has been around for longer, but Veronica’s cool because of the dog. It’s a great selling point. They’re both really good at marketing, but Veronica took it to the next level. Her ads are a lot more memorable because she doesn’t recycle the ads. She’s very timely. When the Barbie movie came out, she did some Barbie-themed ads. She did some Scarface ads. It’s always seasonal and smart.
