John Sonsini

JOHN SONSINI

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JOHN SONSINI

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com

Presence through Absence

by Jeffrey D. Grove

John Sonsini’s recent paintings comprise portraits of a subject he has painted for many years: the immigrant workers who populate the side streets and parking lots of Los Angeles in search of daily employment. Although this is familiar territory for Sonsini, this new body of work is distinguished by a new complexity, not only in the structure and composition of his painting, but also in the execution. As he has reinvigorated his practice with these paintings, Sonsini has also introduced a fresh subject into his lexicon. It is one previously uncharted in his oeuvre, though it has a legacy that reaches deep into the history of art: the still life.

A genre that emerged out of Northern Europe in the late 16th century, the still life has engaged the imagination of artists for centuries, but to Sonsini this new theme came as an unexpected surprise. “I wasn’t looking for alternate subject matter,” he recalls.

A painting that had been traveling in an exhibition was returned to his studio. Its composition included a wallet lying on a bed, and that image captured his attention. At the same time, he had been struggling to paint flowers in a vase as part of another work. Inspired by three foundational essays written by David Sylvester in 1961–62 entitled, “Still Life: Cézanne, Braque, Bonnard,” Sonsini began to incorporate this new methodology into his artwork, a task he describes as “insanely difficult.”

Working to master the still life allowed Sonsini to advance his painting in other ways— compositionally, emotionally, and philosophically. The artist was forced to consider how to address condensed space, how to skirt the risk of allowing narrative elements to dominate the painting, and how to transform a natural subject—a flower for instance—into something of cultural signification. For Sonsini, it is the tension of displacement that allows this transformation to occur. Just as his male subjects don’t register as art when they are encountered outside the studio, neither does a flower as it is found in nature. Only after these subjects are isolated in the studio and removed from their “natural” environment do these quotidian elements take on deeper meaning as objects of artistic inquiry.

Sonsini has stated that it doesn’t require “a lot of imagination” to think of his portraits as a type of still life. Although this exhibition includes only a few works that could be considered classical still lifes—Abel, Roberto, and Periban—their presence infuses the portraits with a heightened poignancy and a deeper emotional intensity.

As the artist has begun devoting increasing attention to these static objects, he has, perhaps not inadvertently, bestowed more authority on his human subjects. In a painting like Periban for

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instance, even as we study the individual articles that comprise the still life, we cannot avoid imagining the life—and absence—of the subject to whom we presume they belong.

Rather than tabula rasa onto which we project our own screen images of what a wallet, a flower, or a baseball cap signifies, these still lifes necessarily and inescapably force us to consider not just the lives of the absent figures, but also the transitory nature of life itself.

By association, we might also then consider the transitional state of living in which many of Sonsini’s portrait subjects find themselves. Of course, if one chooses to relate on a purely emotional level to the figures Sonsini paints, one runs the risk of mapping a fictional identity onto these very real subjects. When we see an accumulation of luggage and boxes tied with string next to the models, we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that they are being displaced from their own homes. Instead we should understand that these items are not mere props but rather the stuff of Sonsini’s own life in the studio.

Among the most powerful works from this group is one that Sonsini painted in late 2014, Periban. A tower of five drawers, stacked akimbo and stripped from the armature that supported them, teeters next to a suitcase stacked with belted blue jeans, a green baseball cap, and white sneakers. A wallet is tucked into one shoe. The carefully composed and lushly painted interior, rendered in earthy browns, cerulean blues, and minty green tonalities, evocatively recalls in structure and tone one of Paul Cézanne’s grand views of Mont Saint Victoire. Beautiful and desolate, this carefully articulated painting of personal objects also conjures a narrative of loss. The owner of these articles has departed, leaving behind his worldly possessions. Like the smaller still lifes, it suggests both life’s possibilities and their potential negation.

If the human figures in Sonsini’s other paintings always offer some representation of truth, the construction of this still life confirms the degree of artifice the artist brings into play when constructing his paintings. Sonsini and his partner, Gabriel, spotted these drawers when they were driving down a street near their home, and they were immediately struck by the scene— not just by the objects themselves, but by the potency of the image. Here was a most private object, something that had housed someone’s intimate possessions, gutted and discarded by the side of the road.

By bringing the drawers into the studio—in fact nailing them together to create an ad hoc sculpture—Sonsini domesticated and cultivated the rejected objects. In a very real sense, these bureau drawers—reconfigured as a still life—become a stand-in for the human figure, now absent from the image. Conveying in this new body of work an almost ineffable quality of “presence through absence,” Sonsini has, through the introduction of a new subject, the still life, simultaneously complicated and humanized a subject—the human figure—that he has n explored repeatedly.

Jeffrey D. Grove, Ph.D., is the former Senior Curator of Special Projects and Research at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. He is currently a curator and scholar based in New York City.

Belt Buckles: An Interview with John Sonsini

by Ian Berry

IAN BERRY: How have the guys changed over the last decade? You have new sitters coming in and out of your studio every month. Has anything changed about meeting them or how you relate to them?

JOHN SONSINI: It has shifted. Many guys who sat for a painting ten years ago had no interest in sitting for another painting. It was one-time-only. But a small cluster of fellows started returning on a regular basis. One of the things I enjoyed and valued about the earliest phases of this project was the anonymity thing.

Q: Meaning how little you knew about them?

A: And how little they knew about me. The sitter learns far more about me, because I don’t think there’s anything more telling about a person than when you watch them working.

Over the years, there seem to be eight or ten specific guys who I continue working with.

Q: Do you reach out to them, or do they call you?

A: More they would call me on a regular basis for work. Initially that didn’t appeal to me, because I enjoyed the surprise and unpredictability of meeting a brand new sitter.

But as I got to know certain guys better, it just fell into place, and I began to want more from the paintings. The paintings began to suggest other things.

Q: When you say want more from the painting, do you mean that you felt at the beginning of this process, it was more on the surface of representation?

A: And the immediacy of the process. I did notice that when I started working with a single sitter more often, my treatment of their image deepened.

Q: How much time do you spend with each sitter? I know that sometimes you weren’t sure if you would ever see a guy come back.

A: That’s true. Even today, sometimes a sitter stops after a couple of days. Ten years ago, a full standing figure would take about seven days. Today, I spend three or four weeks for a similar painting.

Q: Do you know right away when you meet a guy if this is someone you want to spend a month with?

A: Usually. But sometimes I’m wrong about that. And sometimes the sitter expects that this is work he wants to do and then realizes it’s all wrong for him. I used to paint a small head as a kind of introduction to the working process. But, now I draw for a day or two. Each of us gets a sense of what the work will be and if we want to continue.

Q: What are you looking for in a sitter, and has that changed over time?

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A: For example, with Antonio, the cowboy: he was a total stranger to me. In a case like that, I’m so conscious of his image—the face, the hands, the way the shirt falls on the body, the stance, all of that. I didn’t pay so much attention to the subtleties of the image before, but I tend to pay more attention now. The look on his face—I wanted to capture that very look.

Ten years ago, it didn’t matter.

Q: Because you were looking more at form?

A: Yes. I wanted to get the image down as best I could. But in that painting, when he puts his thumb under the buckle and pushes it towards the viewer, it changed the whole painting.

I don’t know if I would have been aware of that a decade ago.

Q: Thinking about who these guys are—travelers in and out of Los Angeles, travelers in and out of your studio, in and out of your life. And what’s in a box—thinking about keeping things and memories. Are the paintings getting more personal?

A: Maybe. Some of the objects in the paintings, like the boxes, are objects from the studio and not so specific to the guys.

Q: Are those suitcases yours?

A: Yes. They’re in the studio. Seven or eight years ago, Gabriel and I were at a secondhand store, and he said to me, “Come back here. I’ve got to show you something.” And on a shelf in the back of the place was a row of about twelve or fifteen old suitcases. And I said, “Well, that’s about the most amazing thing I’ve seen in some time. Let’s take them all and bring them back to the studio.”

Q: What was amazing about them?

A: I saw a relic. Like a lot of incidental things that appear in my paintings…there’s no real specific information we have about them. The suitcases suggested so much but weren’t specific about anything. That’s very much my whole approach to painting faces and figures.

Q: Your paintings aren’t so much about specifics?

A: No they’re not. They’re somewhat more generalized. I used to have a sitter I’d painted many times, and whenever he looked at the finished portrait he’d always say, “Similar, Sonsini.” And I used to say, in my broken Spanish, “Thanks. That’s what I’m going for. I’d like it to be close enough.” In some ways that kind of distance from observational realism may have come in part from my working with Bob Mizer at his AMG Studios (1986–1994).

Of course, the AMG photographs were all about being sexy, playful, fun.

Q: Meaning they were not about individual stories?

A: I was painting the AMG models in those days and also organizing the photos of the same models that Bob Mizer was shooting. Even if the photographs were full of fiction and acting, I still viewed them as portraits of guys I knew. So, even though the images reported nothing biographical about the models, they still were revealing in an electrifying sort of way, and I viewed them, still do, as portraits of people I personally knew. Somehow, Bob was able to tame his desire enough to do these astonishing photographs and still keep a sense of fun and play in the image.

Q: Tame his desire—meaning to pay attention to getting the technical parts done?

A: Yes. Watching him shoot changed how I worked with a live sitter. His shallow space and that wide-angle approach in my work all comes from watching Bob work. And, of course, his ability to let the model kind of guide the process. That was really helpful to me.

Q: When you think of that ability to depict fun, as you say, is that a goal for you?

A: Well, painting is such a slow process. When I have more than one sitter, there definitely is a sense of play involved. Then it’s all about these two or three guys interacting and doing the job of modeling for a painting. I think it’s easier for a photographer to depict fun, because he’s got that lens between them so he can be more of a voyeur. It’s impossible for me to be that.

Q: Because you’re so present?

A: Yes. You’re so engaged with that person it’s impossible to ask him to act out some kind of facial expression or emotion. As soon as you do that, you’re asking the person to become an exhibitionist, and you become a voyeur. And that’s just not possible for me. I think part of that is also my personality. I’m just not a voyeur in that sense.

Q: Many viewers of your work go immediately to the biographies of your subjects.

A: Yes, that happens—being portraits. And in particular, what with my titling each picture with the model’s name and then attaching things like wallets and suitcases to the figures, it does invite all sorts of readings. There’s an anecdote about an artist where somebody remarked, “You know, I probably could appreciate that painting if it weren’t for all the blood you painted.” And the artist responded, “Oh, you mean the red part?” That’s always the issue with representation. Sometimes, something enters into a painting solely because of its formal properties, and then its presence invites other readings. I don’t mind that.

Q: What about desire and attraction as subject?

A: There’s no question. It’s in there. I’m certainly the type of person, and most definitely the type of artist, that if something enters into the painting, it doesn’t matter to me if it alters my original intentions. That’s painting. When an artist is working with a very narrow set of imagery, as I do, a belt, for instance, can be suggestive of so many things. The eroticism is very present.

Q: In some of your still lifes, when you paint jars with the tops off—that top is so much like a nipple.

A: Yes, it is.

Q: It’s been a while since you’ve painted a bare chest.

A: That’s right. I didn’t notice it until later. I didn’t set out to make it look like a nipple, because when it’s sitting there on the table, it certainly doesn’t look that way. But by the time it’s been fed through the shredder of your eye and your hand, it’s the way I painted it. In fact, I think it’s a great nipple. When things like that happen, I make a mental note under the general heading of “Why is it that a rolled-up sock in a shoe is more suggestive than the naked foot?” I started painting the guys a very long time ago. After all this time, I’m still drawn irresistibly to my subject. n And, to those belt buckles.

Ian Berry is the Dayton Director of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. Interview recorded November 22, 2015.

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Rene 2015 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches 50.8 x 40.6 cm

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Gustavo 2015 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches 50.8 x 40.6 cm

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Luis 2015 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches 50.8 x 40.6 cm

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Roberto 2014 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches 50.8 x 40.6 cm

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Luis 2014 Oil on canvas 45 x 36 inches 114.3 x 91.4 cm

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Christian 2015 Oil on canvas 45 x 36 inches 114.3 x 91.4 cm

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Abel 2014 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches 50.8 x 40.6 cm

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Christian 2013 Oil on canvas 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

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David 2013 Oil on canvas 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

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Francisco 2014 Oil on canvas 72 x 48 inches 182.9 x 121.9 cm

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Periban 2014 Oil on canvas 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

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Christian & Alex 2010 Oil on canvas 80 x 96 inches 203.2 x 243.8 cm

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Louie 2015 Oil on canvas 72 x 48 inches 182.9 x 121.9 cm

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Antonio 2015 Oil on canvas 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

Notes on John Sonsini in New York

by Allan M. Jalon I recently inherited a painting by the painter Moses Soyer, a stark yet engaging portrait of a young woman wearing a white blouse. Walking on West 34th Street in Manhattan, I mentioned the piece to John Sonsini and found myself enveloped in a classic exchange. It started with my mental fingers on a thread of information, and ended with the curtain to a vista of Sonsini’s influences pulled open.

“It’s a delightful piece,” I said, of my Soyer. “But I don’t imagine you’ve ever given much thought to the Soyer brothers.”

“Oh, no, I know the Soyers’ work,” Sonsini said. He explained that, as a college student at California State University, Northridge in 1969, he had been given a book of paintings by Raphael Soyer, the twin brother of Moses. “There was a painting in it, a painting of Allen Ginsberg, and it became really important to me. You have got to see this painting.”

That evening, I went online and found a Raphael Soyer drawing of Ginsberg, but no painting.

I sent Sonsini the link. Was that the picture that he meant? He sent back a link to another image, and—did I say vista? Did I say a vista of influences?

Soyer’s Village East Street Scene, painted between 1965 and 1966, shows a grouping of figures on a street on the Lower East Side, where he was living at the time. Soyer painted Ginsberg and, even more prominently, the poet Diane di Prima. It was the first of several paintings with which Soyer built a visual bridge between his generation and the one coming of age in the 1960s. The art historian Samantha Baskind has given a moving explication of the painting in a book called Raphael Soyer and the Search for Modern Jewish Art. Soyer came to this country at age 13 with his Russian-Jewish family. He grew up wanting very much to make his artistic identity universal by withholding the Jewish distinction.

Noting that Soyer painted a dim, fragmented image of himself into the back of the picture, Baskind concluded he was drawing a contrast between his more self-contained, even hidden, sense of his Jewish identity as an émigré and Ginsberg’s boldly self-declared Jewishness.

As the son of Hitler refugees, marked by the interplay between first and second-generation experiences of a European-American family, I am intrigued by her analysis. One appeal Ginsberg had for me, starting when I was a teenager, was his lyrical openness about the painful challenge of finding one’s identity in America. But what drew Sonsini so strongly?

“I was a young, closeted gay guy,” he explained to me. “I had been reading Ginsberg since I was in my teens. I’d read everything that he’d written, and I’d seen him on television talk shows. So, the painting was interesting to me because it was Ginsberg, because he was openly gay, and because he expressed that as an artist.”

I asked Sonsini, citing Baskind’s theory, if there was a parallel between the closed—closeted?— Jewishness that Soyer transcended with his embrace of Ginsberg and Sonsini’s own efforts to find a voice for himself as a gay painter.

“Absolutely,” Sonsini said. And, he said, the dialogue between his private personality and its public expression developed from looking through other pictures in the Soyer book.

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He stressed that he had absorbed the influences of many different painters. Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon, among others, have also shaped him. Still, he said: “I got interested in Soyer’s paintings as paintings, because they were very loosely handled figures, and they really owed a lot to what was going on in abstraction. It looked like he painted very rapidly, and I got interested in that. I took many of his paintings and used the composition, but with a guy. He painted a lot of women. But I’d put a nude man sitting on this bed, instead of the women that Soyer used.”

Soyer’s work suggests painting as a way to peel back the distances between people while showing how difficult it is to overcome those distances. It reflects an urban reality that imposes anonymity on inhabitants of endless variety but also inspires a rebellion against that anonymity through individuality.

Reporting a piece about Sonsini for the Los Angeles Times, ten years ago, I spent about a week observing his daily life as an artist, particularly the dynamics of proximity between him and his subjects as he worked in and moved around outside of his studio-home at the edge of downtown Los Angeles. It is located between a bar on one side and a bodega on the other, and the neighborhood is strongly Latino and working-class in character. It is also home to artists and writers and might be compared, both in its bohemian spirit and its slow gentrification, to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where Soyer lived when he painted Village East Street Scene.

Sonsini moves between his studio and the street—I mean local streets where Latino day-laborers gather to make themselves available to be hired, but also the street in its general sense as the public world. In his studio, he focuses on the space between where his subjects pose and he stands, behind an easel. Between him and the man who looks back at him—men being the subject that instinctively “triggers” him—stretches an openness that I take to be symbolic of the distances between people in general. That applies, especially, to Sonsini’s guys as travelers of the world, refugees, men moving between places and without a dependable home.

Surely, Sonsini gets to know these individuals, their histories in far-away places before America. He pays them double what they’d make building a house or washing outdoor furniture. His Spanish is in a terminal condition of “improving,” as he puts it, and Gabriel, his Mexican-born partner, helps with communication.

The guys, as Sonsini refers to them, quickly understand and respect what he’s about. To the extent possible in a professional relationship, they become his friends.

But something else is happening. It isn’t warmth, necessarily. It isn’t any kind of closeness that can be assumed. It doesn’t want to be that. In fact, his core interest in this process, even during the light exchanges about what the day’s subject has brought for lunch, is making art.

These paintings express the connection of disconnection, but Sonsini doesn’t exempt himself from the problem, which exudes isolation and loneliness. “I realized, looking at Soyer’s paintings, how often he puts (an actual image of) himself into them,” Sonsini told me. “He’s there for a reason. The paintings are all about him. Without that, I don’t much care about his grouped figure paintings.” Sonsini does not place his own image into his pictures. Still, the taut balance of closeness and distance he experiences gives them an autobiographical quality.

Raphael Soyer Village East Street Scene, 1965-66 Oil on canvas 60 x 60 inches © Estate of Raphael Soyer, Courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York

Sonsini’s paintings are ambiguous vessels of perception as a struggle for definition. Their complexity is what Sonsini, like Soyer, works to capture with clarity and beauty. Sonsini is an Italian-American and a gay man, a painter who works closely with what I’d call the aesthetic psychology of one person looking at another.

Soyer was completely taken with the work of Thomas Eakins and wrote a book about his debt to him. Eakins, of course, painted Walt Whitman, a gay man and a national poet who saw inclusion as the outstanding American ideal, despite the differences among us.

Whitman was Ginsberg’s self-claimed poetic father. There can be no doubt that Soyer, painting Ginsberg, was aware of Eakins’s Whitman portraits and that lineage.

Sonsini has read Whitman with passion, absorbing a very specific message that filtered into every image he made. When I first met him, in 2005, he talked a lot about the bearded father of American poetry.

I mentioned the poet, and he said to me: “If you boiled Walt Whitman down to a syrup you’d have to label it ‘All Belong Here.’ ” The question of how to belong to each other, one guy looking at another guy across the space of a studio, is a contemporary artist’s approach to that boiling down.

The syrup Sonsini uses is paint. I did not grasp in 2005, how fully the work sometimes veers toward melancholic bitterness in achieving its adhesive substance. This is especially true with the still lifes Sonsini has done with increasing emphasis since 2013. Both Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse made it clear in comments that they often worked out their ideas in still lifes, which offered them the possibility of an ideal clarity not possible in other genres. Sonsini told me he agrees with that. In still life he can relax, he said, and let the elements affect him without the strong presence of a human subject. Even when painting flowers, Sonsini has come to prefer artificial ones, so the changeable power of nature can’t intrude on him as markedly.

These still lifes apply to the objects of working-class lives with an aesthetic most often associated with high art, revealing them through what T.S. Eliot called the “objective correlative.” The term describes the poetic power of making lives visible through the objects that represent them, a presence in absence. This is true of Sonsini’s suitcases, piles of empty drawers, wallets next to flowers. These past few years, he has painted many wallets—clear symbols of anxious masculine identity. Paintings purely of objects work out a symbolic system that implies the presence of the same figures who appear in portraits. Paintings without human figures carry human names. “In a sense, my paintings are all still lifes,” Sonsini told me. “Even the portraits.”

I turn it around and say to him: “And the still lifes are also portraits.”

“That, too,” he agrees.

I think he means he’s always trying for an extreme of expressive freedom and a distilling clarity. He wants to hold still the loneliness, the uneasiness of people and their objects. The insistence and skill with which he does that are what set him apart. A lot of space surrounds every visible body in these pictures. Enormous pressures enter and play against the careful order Sonsini gives people and the n belongings he places with them. They threaten to tear it apart. But that does not happen.

Allan M. Jalon is a New York-based journalist who writes about the arts. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, during years in LA, he often wrote about contemporary visual artists, including Chris Burden, Larry Bell, and the painter Emerson Woelffer. A Los Angeles Times piece he wrote about John Sonsini appeared in July, 2005. He also writes about literary subjects, and won the 2015 Simon Rockower award in arts reporting for a piece about the 20th Century German novelist Alfred Doeblin.

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

JOHN SONSINI 11 February – 12 March 2016

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe 525 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com

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Publication © 2016 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe All rights reserved Essay © 2015 Jeffrey D. Grove Interview © 2015 Ian Berry Essay © 2015 Allan M. Jalon Photography by Robert Wedemeyer, Los Angeles, CA Page 23, Christopher Burke Studios, New York, NY Catalogue designed by HHA Design, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-4951-3013-7 Cover: Christian & Alex

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