SELECTED WORKS

HUES OF AFFECTION

The work investigates the intersection of leisure, familial love and memory through the mediums of oil paint and dye on canvas. González uses photographs he’s taken of his family and loved ones on vacation and in moments of play, intimacy and rest. The artist isolates these deep moments of connection as a reminder of the importance of remaining grounded in the present moment. He treats these moments with a level of abstraction that speaks to the way that the details of memories morph as time passes, even as the underlying emotion remains potent.

The dyed canvas draws from traditional textile making, Shibori, the Japanese dyeing method from which tie-dye originated. Using different textile methods, González aims to make the work more approachable and recognizable. By incorporating and merging the dye and paint, González bridges cultural divides by using a visual language understood by multiple cultures, inviting many entry points for viewers of different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds to enjoy the work.

"Introducing Hely Omar González to our audience is a true honor. His compelling story and art capture introspection amidst the chaos of nature and the human condition, offering timely and profound insights. We are excited to share his unique saturated vision and powerful narrative with you," says UTA Fine Arts Coordinator Ago Visconti.

THE GLEANERS

Gleaners is a suite of paintings that depict the quotidian activities of a clandestine community living and working on a marijuana processing farm in Northern California. Gonzalez’ series is inspired by and named for Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners (1857), a painting that features three women collecting leftover wheat stalks on a farm in rural France. When first exhibited, the painting drew intense criticism from an upper-class audience still recovering from the fallout of the French Revolution. Millet’s The Gleaners is a timeless representation of the human labor behind capitalism, though gleaning can be traced to Biblical passages that reference ungathered crops and unharvested edges of fields to benefit of those less fortunate. The politics and poetics of gleaning can be evidenced in contemporary environmental activism and prompts fertile discourse on topics including climate change and trickle-down economics.

In 2016, Gonzalez garnered the trust of one such farm and opted to live and work alongside an international cohort of seasonal laborers, drawing and painting his colleagues and their environment during his “non-working” hours. Together they grew, picked, trimmed, dried, processed, and packaged marijuana in the shadows of Mt. Shasta. Gonzalez’ documentation of these processes is both revelatory and mysterious, offering insight into the DIY nature of the operation. For example, in the painting Making Hash in the Garage (2022), a figure monitors an open washing machine adjacent to a tower made of two by fours, sawed off buckets, garbage bags, and rubber tubing. Scattered throughout the workspace is a bottle of bleach, an ice machine, bamboo poles, a tray of green leaves, and a chop saw. Gonzalez sets the scene, though the process of hash production remains hazy. Like the great genre painters before him, Gonzalez renders the mundane with exquisite care. An empty Bud Light box sits atop a kitchen countertop scale waiting to quantify a crop of bud. Fingers assess, bundle, and pick lush leaves. Camping chairs, plastic bins, and other utilitarian objects are ubiquitous.

Gonzalez’ paintings also identify ominous undertones. Collective success in such an operation is unusually precarious—frozen pipes, sudden storms, fires, pests, thieves, and all kinds of natural and unnatural occurrences can end a harvest and leave workers with no income. The harsh realities of the farm are perhaps best reflected in the painting Nights Watch (2022). A man holding a rifle is silhouetted against the grow light glow of makeshift plastic sheeted greenhouses, surrounded by a vast black and purple nightscape. Nights Watch evokes the sublime in all its romantic and existential glory, while reminding the audience of what is at stake—the farm is not a utopic commune and its inhabitants take turns guarding the product at all hours of the day and night.

Gonzalez begins each work by Shibori dying linen in a vivid assortment of colors. Stretching the dried linen and taping off a central rectangle, Gonzalez primes a window and lays down a bright neon underpainting before beginning to render figures, objects, or environments. Slowly building layers of luminosity in paint, Gonzalez captures a variety of natural and artificial diegetic lighting conditions found on the farm, his luscious chiaroscuros giving shape to narrative. The completed oil painting appears to hover picture-in-picture above tie-dye abstractions, like a hallucination of the history of a joint floating in the middle of a psychedelic tapestry. In Japanese, Shibori means “to wring, squeeze, and press,” and the visual—sometimes photographic—impressions of this technique recall the physical labor of each fold, twist, and tie, while drawing parallels to the labor-intensive tasks of weed cultivation.

Gleaners is a love letter to a California in which rich immigrant experiences and hippy counterculture can peacefully coexist. By expanding on the vernacular of work, Gonzalez considers the similarities between leisure and labor as he embraces painting’s ability to tell the multivalent stories of the underrepresented.

WORKHORSE

To inaugurate the gallery’s new Project Space in Los Angeles at 6150 Wilshire Boulevard, Praz-Delavallade is thrilled to present Hely Omar Gonzalez: Workhorse (opening May 7, 2022 | 6-9PM) The exhibition, curated by Michael Slenske, is a two-year painting study by the Long Beach-based artist focusing on the labor, humanity, and socio-political currency behind the Toyota Hi-Lux mini truck, from local leisure pursuits to international rebel insurgencies. Grounded in a neon-classical palette, Gonzalez’s cinematic landscapes and Romantic portraiture are part self-portrait, part social commentary.
“At this moment in human history it’s a beautiful thing to find this commonality between people of different belief systems, cultures, races, and creeds even if it’s over something as simple as this little truck that could,” says Gonzalez, who studied painting at the Laguna College of Art & Design. After earning his BFA, he moved to Long Beach and began a series of conceptual portraiture projects that led him to live and work in the marijuana harvesting scene around Mt. Shasta in 2016 (which resulted in a series of paintings inspired by The Gleaners, the seminal 1857 oil painting by Jean-François Millet depicting three women gleaning the stray stalks from a wheat field after a harvest). During the pandemic, Gonzalez happened upon an ad for a 1989 Toyota 4Runner, a 4x4 passenger version of his father’s Hi-Lux, which served as the impetus for Workhorse. “I essentially bought this truck as a work truck, but in researching the history of the Hi-Lux I found that the uses spanned from SoCal lowrider culture to being this war machine that helped the Chadians defeat [Libyan president Muammar]
his fully funded army in what became known at the Great Toyota War,” explains Gonzalez, referring to the late 1980s conflict that gave birth to the Technical, a light-weight civilian pickup truck that was easy to fix and could safely navigate minefields while carrying machine guns and anti-tank missiles. He also studied The Toyota Way, a business manual on the advanced production system developed by the Japanese industrialist Eiji Toyoda that relies on efficiency, innovation, and heavy investments in workers.
“At the end of day the Hi-Lux is a tool of uprising,” says Gonzalez, who also teases out formal connections in the iconography, profile, and color values of the trucks. The hard-edge lines, which almost evoke Manga comics, always seem to rise to the foreground in Gonzalez’s paintings whether the truck is located in Los Angeles, Africa, or Afghanistan. “From an aesthetic and narrative perspective, it’s a very fruitful subject that connects my work to this tool for specialized labor, be it metal scrapping in the alleys of Long Beach, to the makeshift taxis in Thailand, even to guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan. As someone who’s worked as a specialized laborer, I know that this pursuit is a common one. These people are all getting a job done to lift themselves out from obscurity, poverty, or tyranny.”