Gerald Sequeira likes to paint what appalls him, but you would never guess it looking at his paintings of rows of pink or terra-cotta stucco homes and figurative studies. The vibrant colors give the impression of cheerfulness and well-being, and the thick paint is exuberantly applied. What looks like texture from afar is seen, up close, as words or letters—undecipherable text. Yet Sequeira says the text is the starting point and rationale of the work.
Sequeira has degrees in civil engineering and law. After passing the bar exam in 2002, he spent three months in Europe in an orgy of art-viewing and returned motivated to paint, not practice law. Unschooled in the visual arts and unable to get into a graduate art program, he taught himself to draw and paint with images from his European sojourn imprinted on his brain.
His earliest paintings in the exhibition are a straightforward depiction of stucco homes and a self-portrait in which the brush strokes and color are reminiscent of early Cezanne, the artist he most admires. Particularly in the self-portrait, Sequeira emulates Cezanne, using parallel hatched brushstrokes to build a feeling of mass. As competent as these works are, they are clearly learning exercises.
His formal education and interest in politics gave him the idea that words could add a subplot and alter the pictorial space in an original way. His first attempt to incorporate text is another self-portrait he calls his “signature piece.” In it, his face and background are literally formed by the repetition of his painted signature. Although clever in concept, the image seems to dissolve and fragment like a Star Trek transporter malfunction.
How exactly does a painter integrate symbols into his work without sacrificing the painterly surface and integrity of the image? The path was illuminated when he happened upon Jasper Johns’ “#8” in the Pop Art exhibition at the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum. He was seduced by the stenciled number’s sensual movement and symbolic meaning, and followed up with a visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to see Johns’ one-man show.
He returned to the subject of homes, stenciling the words in grids or streaming them across the canvas. There are several of these paintings in the show, and they demonstrate the enormous leap forward his work has taken.
Mining articles from the Internet, he uses them to combine a local story with a bigger story—the rise in Las Vegas home prices and the war in Iraq, for example. (The government didn’t step in to stop sub-prime loans because the increase in sales they created meant higher home prices, and happy homeowners don’t think about war.) The shapes of the letters give the canvases a texture that unites the subject and background and adds a visual complexity lacking in the earlier work.
Newly emboldened by the successful incorporation of text in his suburban streetscapes, and drawing on his memories of European art, Sequeira painted his wife in poses reminiscent of the work of Georges de La Tour, the 17th-century French baroque artist. La Tour, popular in his own time but forgotten until being rediscovered in the 20th century, has becomes a favorite of contemporary artists, appealing to the modern sensibility by his use of large volumes and absence of background. La Tour’s paintings of Mary Magdalene inspired the poses in Sequeira’s figurative studies “Linked” and “Tuned In.” The former depicts his wife sitting at the computer, the entire surface a grid of letter blocks; the latter depicts her listening to her iPod, the surface a scrawl of digital-like print. The pensive quality perfectly echoes the mood of the Magdalene paintings Sequeira so admires. The juxtaposition of quiet and busy, tuned in and tuned out, is marvelous.
Like his idols, Cezanne and Johns, Sequeira reconciles a free handling of paint with the use of severe geometric shapes, in his case the grid. Like them, he has a conversation with himself that is about creating and concealing, forming and burying. The meaning in his political texts is obscured by the elisions, but the point of art is that it shows rather than says. Whatever Sequeira intends his work to mean, it succeeds in leaving room for the unconscious to accrue meaning, the real object of art.
Paintings by Gerald Sequeira
Clark County Library
1401 E. Flamingo Road, 507-3400
Through June 15