ALBERT CONTRERAS and MATT MARELLO
After a highly successful painting career in the mid-1960s, Albert Contreras found himself in an uncomfortable situation. He felt that he had done enough, taken his painting as far as it could go. And although he had regularly scheduled exhibitions, and private collectors and museums in the U.S. and abroad were buying his art, he gave it up. For 25 years.
During that time, Contreras worked for the City of Los Angeles, driving trucks mostly. But after he retired, he decided to start painting again, in 1996, with a vengeance. This exhibition will mark Albert Contreras’s third solo exhibition in the past year, and his first ever in New York.
The paintings are vibrantly colored, thickly applied, and are often comprised of only two or three primary colors on a monochromatic field. (Clearly, the Supremacists have been influential.) Both youthful and extravagant, Contreras’s work also embodies a feeling for the dazzling light of Santa Monica, where the artist lives in a modest, rent-controlled studio/apartment two blocks from the Pacific Ocean.
For his second showing at the gallery, video artist, Matt Marello, will present “The Fight,” a digitally altered sequence from a little-known 1940s black & white film. As in earlier works like “Titanic” or “The Last Days of Pompeii,” Marello has inserted himself for one of the original hard-pressed stock characters, scrambling for safety below decks, or amid lava flows and toppling marble, to hilarious effect. “The Fight” allows for a rarer opportunity, one in which Marello takes on the roles for two sweating, heaving combatants, so we watch fitfully, along with the jeering rabble ringside, as the artist beats himself to a pulp.