The working subject

John Sonsini, “Jose & Enrique,” 2006

The working subject

In John Sonsini’s portraits, day laborers leave their jobs at the door

By Rachel Youens

Portraiture is experiencing a comeback, which makes John Sonsini’s timely portraits of Latino day laborers doubly relevant. Through his visceral, painterly approach to his subjects — working men who stand rooted in space, looking out at us — Sonsini crosses racial and class divisions in the pristine, high-ceilinged Cheim & Read gallery, foregrounding his subjects’ individuality against the backdrop of their immigrant status. These are not paintings that corral an art audience into a sentimental or condescending response. Rather, these life-sized works create an encounter in which we see Sonsini in the process of surpassing his own limitations to moments of recognition, where generalization and individuality intersect. At that point, we can recognize our own strengths and limitations by identifying with the artist’s process.

In works such as “Elisandro” or “Jose and Enrique,” lushly rich and thickened backgrounds of pinks, greens and blues silhouette these men, whose olive, ochre, and brown skin tones and near-black eyes look outward, while they stand with their arms to their sides, crossed, or in their pockets. They wear work shirts, occasionally a watch or belt, and universally craggy blue jeans that cascade around the volumes of their legs, drape across round-toed gym shoes and scrape the ground. Occasionally, a knapsack has been set upon the ground. Their generic work clothes identify their daily activities and their status, and remind us that these men have adapted the fashions of a new and foreign culture. Sonsini’s thickly painted and roughened surfaces describe structural areas through his graphic use of light and dark tones; his surfaces range from scraped areas to loaded brush work and thickly-troweled impastos, describing edges of hair, shadows that curve above young men’s eyes and around cheeks, to the planes of light falling on the clefts of chins. Gritty textures and rich tones often articulate his subjects’ arms and hands which have a sense of moving musculature. By posing his subjects with a modernist frontality and inter weaving his figures with space through planes of oil-thickened paint, Sonsini creates a naturalistic-seeming continuity through which each man looks toward us, singly or in a row, giving the illusion not of objects, but of men who face future choices.

Sonsini pays his sitters $20.00 an hour, three times over the minimum wage. Through his partner Gabriel Barajas, who acts as a liason and a translator, they are recruited from day labor lines around Los Angeles, and pose for Sonsini for about 25 sessions of five hours each. In the catalogue, we find out that Christian is from El Salvador and does construction work and that Manuel was a school teacher in Guatemala. In interviews, they describe their thoughts about the difference between the kind of work they do in their day trades and the work of posing as models. Like a work place, the studio becomes a milieu for conversation, speculation and reminiscence. While Sonsini is an employer and a producer, his working method is tied to the legacy of painters and art making as activities that reflect the culture of the artisan. This tradition is upheld by artists such as Willem de Kooning, who painted a series of portraits of real or imgined men during the 1930s and likewise admired the professionalism and skill of sign painters in Hoboken, New Jersey. De Kooning thought that the painter, like the worker, should be paid a working wage for their knowledge, skill, and production. [is this accurate still? I cut a word. Also, is it worth mentioning that de kooning painted houses and was a day laborer of sorts himself?]

Sonsini does a few very stylish things here which lend an overriding mood to the show as a unified whole. He separates his subjects from any specific surroundings using emphatically abstract pink backgrounds that are reminiscent of Phillip Guston. He also carves thick spaces between and around his figures with caked-on whites, gestural blues and greens, and splattered offhand vermilions, that, while exuberantly descriptive, are derived from Hans Hofmann. By creating a landscape-type space, he solves certain problems that plague portraiture, like setting and horizon, which were also addressed by Eduard Manet. The generalizing qualities of Sonsin’s paintings link him to certain West Coast painters like Elmer Bischoff, whose return to the figure in the late fifties challenged East Coast aestheticism. By equalizing his gaze, and adapting a high-style approach that is grounded in the process of looking, Sonsini momentarily integrates the outsider status of his subjects.