Life stories told in paint
I think John Sonsini may be the greatest portrait painter in the country.
His pictures of working-class men capture essential aspects of their individuality while revealing essential things about our world.
Sonsini’s portraits raise profound questions about identity — race, class, sexuality — while laying bare the cultural, economic and political underpinnings of the ways we see ourselves, especially in relation to others: people with different backgrounds, different dreams.
At the gallery Vielmetter Los Angeles, “Cowboy Stories & New Paintings” consists entirely of oils on canvas — 11 portraits and one still life.
The still life throbs with pathos, its pair of leather belts and lone coat hanger dangling from nails hammered into a bare wall that Sonsini has painted quickly and with great facility. Some brushstrokes are beefy, with paint spread liberally and deliciously. Others have been made by brushes with barely any paint on their bristles. Parts of the canvas remain bare, as if Sonsini ran out of supplies — or time — and abandoned the unfinished picture.
That’s the same feeling that the belts and hanger convey. They look as if they’ve been left behind by someone on the run. Or maybe they were passed over by a model who simply wanted to wear something other than the brown and black belts hanging on the dressing-room wall.
A similar sense of on-the-run urgency and fashion-conscious self-presentation takes heart-wrenching form in Sonsini’s portraits. Whether standing or seated, alone or in pairs, painted up close or from a distance, each of the men in his ferociously brushed paintings is at once vulnerable and dignified, humble and honorable, pedestrian and poetic.
Sonsini’s empathy is palpable. So is the respect of distance, of knowing that you never can know what it’s like to be someone else.
These portraits are all about vulnerability and power. As a gay man who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, Sonsini likely was an outsider — distrusted and misunderstood, disparaged and discriminated against. That matches the emotional atmosphere of his portraits.
He finds his models in parking lots outside home improvement centers in Mid-City Los Angeles, where day laborers often gather. Sonsini spends about five weeks getting comfortable with a sitter, making sketches and studies before picking up a paintbrush.
All but two portraits were made in 2019 and depict Latinos dressed for the rodeo. Their cowboy hats, belt buckles and leather boots inject a jolt of realism into Western stereotypes and Hollywood clichés. Two paintings from 2008 and 2009 show men in work boots. Saul and Lorenzo appear in both groups. The boyish openness seen in the early work appears weathered but not hardened in recent paintings.
By enlarging his sitters’ feet, Sonsini makes each man, whether standing or seated, seem to tower over the viewer. He amplifies that impression by painting most of his subjects looking upward — as if engaged in conversations with people who are taller.
Stand before his paintings and you may realize that you’ve been made to feel as if you’re heads and shoulders above where you actually are. Literally and metaphorically falling short, you feel power and vulnerability flip flop.