Raúl Gonzo seems to be misplaced in his personal front room. That’s as a result of, sitting there in his pale denims and live performance tee, holding a cup of espresso, his human kind virtually disappears towards the super-saturated visible thrum of this parlor painted in shades of fuchsia, marigold, cyan and shamrock inexperienced.
However the mismatch isn’t nearly colour: It seems like the lounge needs to be inside Gonzo’s head, as a substitute of outdoor. Within the hallway behind him, a desk and chairs soften into the wall, as does a lamp and half a rotary dial phone, whereas a bespectacled stag’s head smokes a pipe over a hearth mantel that veers at a dizzying cant, on high of which a neon yellow blunderbuss waits for Elmer Fudd to return over for some Wabbit searching with Hunter S. Thompson. It’s just like the dream sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound interpreted as a Looney Tune directed by Tim Burton—all influences on his work, in accordance with Gonzo.
This vivid dreamworld as a substitute lives inside a weathered Victorian-era duplex in West Sacramento’s Washington neighborhood, simply throughout the river from the Crocker Artwork Museum, the place Gonzo’s first solo museum present, Shade Insanity, opens June 30, with about two dozen of his elaborately staged images. The show options two footage that had been taken on this very room, together with A Girl’s Den, by which a brunette mannequin carrying Nineteen Fifties lingerie and thigh-high velvet boots cradles the comical yellow gun in entrance of the tilty inexperienced hearth, a harmful, glamorous vamp plunked down smack in the midst of Toontown, unaware that the extra critically she takes herself the extra hopelessly absurd she seems. Ah, isn’t that the human predicament?
It feels important that Gonzo inhabits this stage set, which blurs the strains between acutely aware and dream states, fiction and actuality, 24/7. He’s a bit like Vincent van Gogh consuming his pigments in a gut-level try at merging with them, besides Gonzo is bathing in them as a substitute.
Lanky, languid and affable, Gonzo is the spitting picture of a younger Jimmy Stewart taking part in reverse an invisible, 6-foot, 3-inch rabbit in Harvey as he describes the method by way of which he phases elaborate units for his distinctive images. Then he stops, grins and says, “If this work was a relationship, it might in all probability sound form of poisonous.” He shakes off the notion. “No, no, no! I’m obsessive about it, and it’s obsessive about me. I’m certain it’s wholesome.”
Gonzo began life as a Raúl, however with a distinct final title that he politely declines to share. He left it behind when he was christened “Gonzo” at age 20—not by his dad and mom, and never by himself, however by his fellow artwork college students at Yuba Faculty in a little bit of art-school cleverness. They had been riffing off of two characters in Concern and Loathing in Las Vegas, creator Hunter S. Thompson’s fictional alter ego Raoul Duke and his sidekick Dr. Gonzo.
Namesakes apart, a greater candidate for spirit information may be Gonzo the Nice, the quixotic Muppet prankster of unsure species who gleefully ate a rubber tire on stage to the tune of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” on The Muppet Present in 1976—a puppet striving to create efficiency artwork, or to parody efficiency artwork, or each. “I really feel like I’m extra like that Gonzo,” Raúl agrees, “who is known as that simply because he’s bizarre.”
Francesca Wilmott, the Crocker’s curator of artwork who’s staging the present, calls him a retrofuturist—and he thinks she’s nailed it. “That’s considered one of my favourite phrases to say: retrofuturistic. It’s nostalgic. It typically feels romantic, or provocative,” he says, earlier than dropping right into a mischievous, conspiratorial whisper, so as to add: “However more often than not, it needs to be humorous. If it’s not humorous, I’m not tremendous .”
His photos normally characteristic pinup-perfect, vaguely mid-century feminine figures, usually captured in awkward stances or conditions which might be every somewhat tragicomic: tripping over a procuring cart in a market with no labels, driving whereas crying, watching an exploding TV set. They’re all dreamily stunning, and one thing about their brightly coloured lives is all the time off. Retrofuturistically talking, they’re harking back to a meme from a few years in the past that George Jetson, everyone’s favourite ’60s dad from the long run, was presupposed to have been born in 2022. The anachronistic ladies in Gonzo’s photos appear to be grappling with the conclusion that, to cite the little “g” gonzo thinker Yogi Berra, the long run ain’t what it was once. And it’s onerous to know whether or not to shout at them to get up and scent the local weather change, or give in and be part of them of their beautiful, melancholy defeat.
Along with the staged photos, the Crocker present contains an immersive, experiential set up that places museum guests aboard a fantastic, fictional model of a pink-soaked Pan Am airliner. Museumgoers can sit within the seats for a one-way flight to Gonzoland, watching a video loop known as Shade Insanity in Movement, composed of live-action video from Gonzo’s picture shoots, in order that the photographs within the exhibit flutter to life.
Gonzo bought a style for the interactive set up piece when he participated within the Artwork Lodge challenge in 2016, when roughly 100 artists had been invited to create work contained in the rooms and hallways of a downtown Sacramento resort slated for demolition. He positioned a purple bathtub in a purple room and crammed it with clouds and rain ({a photograph} of that design, Tea Time, Tub Time, Half I, with a mannequin within the tub holding a blue umbrella, is included within the Crocker exhibit). Within the informal ambiance of the Artwork Lodge, Gonzo was delighted to see guests leaping into the tub to take selfies.
“He’s created his personal dreamworld, and we’re hoping with the exhibition and with that immersive set that you just’ll have the ability to truly step into that world,” Wilmott says. “You might be transported—that’s the aim.”
9 years in the past, Gonzo stumbled upon the method that may come to outline this and maybe the remainder of his life’s work when he directed a video in 2015 for Texas-based singer-songwriter Victoria Celestine known as “Wasted Tears,” by which his idea was to have the singer mendacity on a mattress in a room the place the whole lot on the set is white. “That was so enjoyable,” he says. “Then I believed, ‘Wait a minute, I can paint issues.’ ” Not simply white, however any colour. He had been searching for a means to reply to what he noticed as an unwelcome shift in video and nonetheless images towards CGI-generated inauthenticity. The place he’d beloved the stop-motion and different tangible, real-life visible results in early Tim Burton movies like Pee Wee’s Large Journey and Beetlejuice, Gonzo discovered the digital manipulations of Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Manufacturing unit adaptation soulless. So nearly as a cry of protest, he began creating his personal real-life results utilizing paint. He painted issues that by rights shouldn’t be painted, like a automotive—home windows and all—a phone, a TV set with no display screen. To Gonzo, it felt transgressive. “Nobody’s going to knock on my door and be like, ‘Excuse me, sir, you possibly can’t paint that,’ ” he says. “But it surely actually felt like I discovered a loophole within the system.” He’s onto one thing: The right, digitally mastered photos we see round us in every single place depart nowhere for our imaginations to flourish, whereas Gonzo’s stagecraft leads us dreamily by the hand into the potent land of make-believe.
This was the beginning of Gonzo’s Shade Insanity sequence and his journey into positive artwork images. “I used to be solely going to do a pair, however then I fell in love,” he says.
This aha second led to a centered physique of labor the place “actual” objects and individuals are coloured as brightly as in the event that they had been animated, and a few gorgeous results are achieved utilizing the only mechanical means. Contemplate one shoot the place a mannequin named Mosh (extra on her later) seems in the midst of a vibrant yellow highlight surrounded by darkness. Gonzo shared a publish on Instagram exhibiting how the impact happened: Within the picture, there seems to be a highlight. In a brief video panning across the meticulously created set, nonetheless, you possibly can see that the circle of yellow mild is painted throughout the objects, as is the black background.
Surprisingly, Shade Insanity would be the first fine-art present of any type for the 45-year-old artist from Yuba Metropolis, who’s already a profitable music video director—he’s made round 400 of them for shoppers as notable because the Goo Goo Dolls, Kat Von D, Grammy-winning British artist Jacob Collier and, domestically, Deftones’ lead singer Chino Moreno. One music video he directed for a collaboration between MAX and Chromeo in 2019 has racked up almost 7 million views on YouTube. One other for the Japanese band One Okay Rock has clocked over 21 million.
“I haven’t even had something in a gallery but, so I’m doing issues backwards,” he says. “I’m fairly naive about the way it works. I simply respect with the ability to present whereas I’m alive. I do know that sounds humorous, however I’m severe.”
Gonzo was born in Artesia, close to Anaheim—fourth-generation Mexican American on his father’s aspect, a “Caucasian combine” on his mom’s aspect. His dad and mom divorced when he was simply 3, and he grew up with a single dad, a carpenter who moved them round rather a lot, finally settling in Wheatland when Gonzo was 13. As quickly as he turned 17, he lit out for the large metropolis—Yuba Metropolis, that’s.
He took some artwork and videography courses at Yuba Faculty—that was the place fellow college students took to calling him Gonzo—and acquired a 35mm Pentax movie digicam to begin taking pictures this and that, very a lot beneath the affect of Tim Burton and Wes Anderson, he says now. By 24, Gonzo had a job instructing movie on the Marysville Constitution Academy for the Arts, and was divorced with two kids.
His world bought larger at age 27, when he discovered a mentor in Dean Tokuno, a trend photographer with shoppers like Marshall Discipline’s and Filene’s who had semi-retired to take over his household’s Yuba County walnut farm. Tokuno had additionally shot promoting images for David Lynch’s surreal and groundbreaking TV masterpiece Twin Peaks within the ’90s. A mutual good friend launched them and so they hit it off, first working collectively on a promo for a prune farming operation in Yuba Metropolis. Gonzo finally requested Tokuno if he may be curious about lighting a music video for a neighborhood band.
“It was completely symbiotic,” Tokuno says. “I daresay I may need taught him just a few issues, however to be clear, he’s all the time had a imaginative and prescient. He’s like an iceberg: What you see on high doesn’t even scratch the floor of how deep he’s.”
The collaboration gelled. Gonzo bought an agent in 2010 and he and Tokuno have made almost 100 music movies collectively since. And in parallel, Gonzo started to develop his distinctive type as a positive artwork photographer. Tokuno compares Gonzo to a different good friend—the late, iconic German trend photographer Helmut Newton, whose transgressive model of stylized, fetish-chic noir was so broadly imitated that he impressed as a lot trend as he captured in photos. Tokuno believes Gonzo is already influencing different artists like that. “I defined to him that it’s flattering,” he provides. “[He’s] impressed them. If you happen to’re going to repeat one thing that Raúl does, then you definitely’re steps behind him, as a result of he’s on to the subsequent factor.” Certainly one of Gonzo’s prized possessions is a Rolleiflex digicam that after belonged to Newton, gifted to him by Tokuno.
In 2014, shortly after the tip of a long-term relationship and the delivery of his third baby, Gonzo lit out for the large metropolis once more—Sacramento this time. Right this moment, Gonzo is in a brand new relationship with a grade-school instructor. His 24-year-old son Ashton hopes to enter the police academy quickly, whereas daughter Piper turns 24 in July and is an actual property agent like her mother, and 14-year-old Dimitri splits his time between West Sacramento along with his dad and Yuba Metropolis along with his mother.
With none formal analysis, Gonzo suspects himself of being neuroatypical, and that tracks with the myriad minor obsessions that fill his days. “I’m a creature of behavior,” he explains. “So there are 30 issues I love to do daily.” He practices the keyboard. Then his languages—Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Ukrainian and American Signal Language. (“I really like studying languages,” he says. “I’m simply not good at any of them.”) Then he would possibly take a Kenpo karate class, or go to the library, or sit and sketch with a scorching chocolate at Outdated Soul Espresso on the Weatherstone on twenty first Road, or take Dimitri to the curler rink, the place they’re studying to skate. “Curler skating is my factor now,” he says.
There’s additionally a half-time day job that pays the payments, at Moonracer Movies, the place he makes academic movies for entities just like the Clear California marketing campaign and the California Neighborhood Faculty Chancellor’s Workplace. In the course of the hiring course of, he says, “They stated, ‘This isn’t inventive work, are you up for it?’ And I stated, ‘Imagine me, I want the stability.’ ”
Early on within the pandemic, Gonzo additionally branched out into stand-up comedy, taking courses from native comedians Melissa McGillicuddy and Johnny Taylor Jr. and attending open mic nights at Vince’s Ristorante in West Sacramento. “My preliminary impression was that his comedy was so totally different,” says Taylor, who appeared within the 2021 “California” music video that Gonzo directed for Saturday Night time Reside alum Melissa Villaseñor. “I didn’t essentially know if it was good or not, however I believed it was distinctive. There have been a whole lot of concepts, and a whole lot of creativity; he’s one of the crucial inventive individuals I’ve ever met.” Certainly one of Gonzo’s most profitable bits was bringing an easel on stage and flipping by way of his images with a working commentary. “The through-line is his artwork,” Taylor says. “He’s a visible storyteller.”
On stage, Gonzo usually wears his “skeleton swimsuit”—a black enterprise swimsuit printed with a purple skeleton. “I really like that swimsuit a lot,” he says. “I undoubtedly need to be buried in it. A comedy funeral could be actually humorous.”
That humorousness crosses over into his visible artwork, which is a part of what drew the eye of the Crocker’s chief curator Scott A. Shields. Gonzo was impressed to strategy the museum after seeing the 2017 present Flip the Web page: The First 10 Years of Hello-Fructose Journal, that includes artists from the influential artwork periodical, together with pop surrealists like Mark Ryden and Todd Schorr, together with an immersive set up by Mark Dean Veca the place guests might lounge in beanbag chairs surrounded by a riotous graphical colorscape. These artists had been Gonzo’s individuals. It took some time, however in 2020, he put collectively a presentation deck—he knew the way to promote an concept from constructing lots of of idea displays for music movies—and despatched it to the museum.
Shields favored what he noticed. “The work speaks for itself,” he says, including that Gonzo continues a regional custom of weaving humor into in any other case severe positive artwork, from Roy De Forest’s grinning, cartoonish wild canines to Robert Arneson’s porcelain bathroom sculptures (to not point out the Egghead sculptures scattered in regards to the UC Davis campus) and Mike Henderson’s watermelon-eating spin on The Final Supper. Certainly, when De Forest, Arneson, Henderson, Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley joined the fledgling artwork division at UC Davis within the ’60s and early ’70s, they had been beginning with only a Quonset hut at an agricultural faculty—therefore the type that Wiley dubbed “Dude Ranch Dada.” Shields notes this heritage in Gonzo’s tackle the NorCal custom. “There’s a whole lot of nostalgia in regards to the photos,” he says. “And somewhat little bit of Stepford Wives,” referring to the campy 1975 horror movie by which suburban housewives are changed by good robots. “There’s additionally a powerful ’80s MTV high quality,” Shields provides. “Devo involves thoughts.”
READ MORE: “By Any Means Vital, I Will Hold Being an Artist.” – Mike Henderson displays on his profession and one of many best college artwork departments ever assembled
Francesca Wilmott, the Shade Insanity curator, sees a present like Gonzo’s as crucial to the Crocker’s mission. “The Crocker has all the time been a recent establishment,” she says. “When the Crocker household began accumulating within the mid-1800s, they had been accumulating the artwork of their time. Thomas Hill was acquired the 12 months the work was painted, similar for Charles Christian Nahl. They had been taking dangers. There are different [more contemporary] examples. Like in our Black Artists in America present, now we have a Betye Saar piece that was made in 1975 and purchased in 1975. So, what does that imply at this time? How can we stock ahead that legacy?”
And as Shields factors out, the Crocker gave a younger Thiebaud his first solo museum present, too, in 1951—not all that lengthy after the artist was promoting his early work in a Safeway car parking zone.
A number of days after the tour of his home, Gonzo affords a tour of his skilled images studio in an industrial park close to the Cal Expo-area Costco. This warren of studios, soundstages, dressing rooms, places of work and prop rooms is the place he shoots most of his pictures and music movies—he’s in demand sufficient that his collaborators, together with the Goo Goo Dolls and Kat Von D, have come to Sacramento to work with him. Props from his previous units nonetheless sit piled on high of some cupboards in a single storage room—there’s a gold-painted cello, a blue chook in a scorching pink cage, a inexperienced bicycle with sq. yellow wheels. He factors out a loft the place he used to spend many hours immersing himself in sketching, creating and photographing nearly every day, dashing right down to arrange shoots spontaneously. Nowadays he solely arranges shoots for his nonetheless images round twice a 12 months, each as a result of the elaborately staged photos are so costly to arrange, and since 10 years in, he’s nonetheless growing the complexity of every idea.
Standing on an empty soundstage between a inexperienced display screen and a cornerless white backdrop, he exhibits a sketch for a picture he’ll shoot in July. It’s a diorama mashing up figures with furnishings—form of just like the anthropomorphized furnishings in Disney’s Magnificence and the Beast, however with a surreal, sinister streak. A mannequin with a set of dresser drawers for a physique is wanting down into an open high drawer at a pair of balloons nestled inside. The balloons may very well be breasts (the joke may be a “chest” of drawers), and the mannequin’s hand is poised to pop them with a pin. It might simply be a scene out of Luis Buñuel’s seminal Un Chien Andalou—the 1929 surrealist quick movie co-written by Salvador Dali, primarily based largely on fragments of the 2 artists’ desires.
Evidently, it takes a particular form of mannequin for a Gonzo shoot. One such mannequin, Mosh—a mononymous former gymnast turned burlesque star—acts as muse for her frequent collaborator. “He employed me for a music video, had me put my finger on a file participant like I used to be a Victrola machine, and we’ve been mates ever since,” she says on a name from Los Angeles, the place she lives.
Mosh has her personal concept as to why Gonzo’s superficially cartoonish work has a lot soul. “Some photographers actually objectify their fashions, not in a derogatory or malicious sense,” she says. “It’s simply that they form of use them as a software and an extension of themselves, reasonably than seeing them as people. I’ve by no means as soon as felt like Raúl simply wished me to do one thing as a result of I used to be the model of the day. He has respect for who he’s photographing, that they’re a dwelling, respiration, natural life kind. Raúl makes use of that to his benefit, immersing the mannequin in his world—after which he will get these outcomes.”
While you see Mosh within the {photograph} titled Mars Vixen, carrying a purple patent leather-based catsuit and brandishing a ray gun à la Jane Fonda in Barbarella, she’s very a lot the topic of the picture, not the article. Gonzo could have painstakingly created the world for the picture, however he additionally created it for her to inhabit wholly, so there’s rather a lot happening behind these completely made-up eyes when the shutter snaps.
Within the foreword to Gonzo’s 2021 espresso desk ebook for his Shade Insanity sequence, tv author and producer Andy Reaser (Gray’s Anatomy and Fairly Little Liars) wrote of those feminine figures, “Whereas in some photos they appear to play as much as expectations of their lives, in others we nearly sense them planning an escape, understanding the complexities of seeing the artifice of their lives. This makes the individuals dwelling on this dream extremely human to me. There are realities we might by no means bear with out constructing methods to course of and deal with them. We add colour, we add chaos, we do no matter we will to distract from the truth that we wish what we resent, we concern what we love….”
Wilmott compares Gonzo to the photographer Cindy Sherman, whose physique of labor consists totally of self-portraits in costume as numerous personae—some stunning, some grotesque, starting from a Nineteen Sixties Italian film star to a dewy schoolgirl to a circus clown to a corpse. What makes them so compelling aren’t the costumes and set items, however how the artist inhabits them, as if every had been a privileged glimpse into her inside life, the self the world by no means sees. Gonzo’s work shares that high quality of utilizing outward spectacle as a window right into a wealthy inside panorama—as a result of that’s, in spite of everything, what artwork does finest.
Luis Buñuel as soon as stated, “Give me two hours a day of exercise, and I’ll take the opposite 22 in desires—offered I can keep in mind them.” With an concept between his tooth, Gonzo would in all probability additionally spend 22 hours a day in Dreamland if he might—the twist being that almost all of his real-life exercise unfolds as if in a dream.
“I simply turned obsessive about this,” he says, gesturing to the empty stage the place the sketch on his cellphone will quickly burst forth into full, flagrant actuality. “I’m so excited to do it. When I’ve an concept, it’s the factor that will get me up within the morning like a child on Christmas Day.”