Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce a solo presentation of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist John Sonsini for EXPO Chicago 2021. Painted in 2020-2021 the presentation comprises a group of seven new portraits of Sonsini’s long-term partner and portrait sitter Gabriel Barajas. Sonsini has painted over 200 portraits of Gabriel over the years and he was his sole subject for nearly six years dating back to 1995. Due to the pandemic, Sonsini began to paint Gabriel again both in response to the new constraints of having sitters at the studio and in the interest of returning to a familiar subject. 

These new paintings, six straight-on bust-style portraits and one larger full-length portrait evoke a specific intimacy and dexterity that can be attributed both to Sonsini’s mastery of his craft and the familiarity with his subject. Painted with the immediacy of portrait photography and the tactility of paint typically associated with painterly abstraction, these works act as snapshots of the couple’s interaction day after day without distraction. The bust portraits themselves evoke, for the viewer, a shared experience of looking repeatedly at the same subject and finding slight variations that serve to question one's notion of the tenuous nature of capturing one's appearance. The most apparent differences between the 20×16” portraits appear at first glance to be the color of Gabriel’s shirt, the growth of facial hair, the angle of light, or the color of the background, but with sustained attention, one begins to notice the variations in the application of paint, brushstrokes, and tonalities. In fact, the paint handling begins to assert itself as not only the vehicle of the subject but the subject itself–Gabriel’s features and the paint appear to be one and the same. 

The larger portrait depicts Gabriel in full length wearing his athletic clothing and holding a soccer ball in one hand while lifting his shirt with the other as if just cooling down from playing a game, an open duffle bag in the left foreground is filled with other athletic equipment. The light gesture of lifting his shirt is both a signal to suggest his recent activity and a nod back to Sonsini’s earliest portraits of Gabriel in partial nudity done between 1995 and 2001 before the painter and sitter decided to move away from the more pointedly homoerotic style of painting that had characterized most of all their previous portrait work. The new less intimate and more painterly approach is meant to convey less about the sitter’s likeness and more about his presence.  As Sonsini states in his own words about painting these portraits: “Gabriel is a remarkable man and I try to make the paint behave in a way that will convey this.”