A painter working with figuration and abstraction, deploying graphic strategies rooted in photography and print media, Wayne Gonzales’s complex artistic practice has spanned over twenty-five years. Though they are visually inviting, his paintings remain open and elusive, characterised by layered subject matter and a sharp worldview, with political themes lurking beneath their meticulous surfaces.
Crowd, a series of five copperplate etchings, expresses Gonzales’s ongoing fascination with the theme of our culture’s indeterminate mass. These prints show a group of houses (inspired by a Walker Evans photograph from the 1936 series American Photographs), a group of people bathing, parked cars, groups of people sitting and standing at the edge of a forest, perhaps waiting for a concert, a meeting, or a picnic. As with Gonzales’s large scale paintings, these images leave the viewer with more questions than answers. Technically, they are a series of landscapes, however these pictures seem to have been jarringly pried loose from genre and their original contexts—less appropriated than re-authored. In their detached state of beauty, these works suggest a burnished and weary reportage on our collective state of being. For this series of etchings, the artist’s first in over twenty years, he applied scratches and cross-hatching directly to the copper plates to provide a diffused sense of light and dark, which paradoxically seems to add detail to the images. The portfolio’s five works take on a surprising and dynamic unity, despite the disparate content seen in each individual “frame”.