By Bill Kelley
Director, www.latinart.com

Salomón Huerta’s paintings of California style houses are a mix between the realistic and the imaginary. The artist first thought about painting them while visiting the neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles. Huerta was raised in Los Angeles, and given the area’s reputation as an area of crime and poverty he was struck by the house’s iconic status as a symbol of the California dream - a house, a yard, lots of sunshine, etc. A tension arises in this contrast of realities and imaginaries.

The middle class suburbia turned inner city ghetto, with all their assigned associations, has now, in Huerta’s paintings, turned into something else. Huerta makes use of our need, as viewers, to assign meaning to a form, especially to something like a house, a form so familiar and so charged with associations. He does this in a way that lets us assign our own tensions to the work.

What are we seeing in the work? What associations are we making? These paintings remain accessible and relational, there’s a great deal of communication going on in a house whose doors remain closed.

Huerta removes all signs of habitation, alteration, toys on the yard, personal touches, and saturates his homes with rich and pristine pastels, evenly and flawlessly applied. This technical application only heightens the pristine "iconicity" of the homes and the painting itself.

In many earlier works, Huerta would include the streets directly in front of the house in the painting’s foreground.

His later works would see him removing the street in the lower half of the composition and begin to focus greater attention on the geometric qualities of the house itself. Sharp triangular pines would flank the structure on either side, often in succession, increasing in size and dimension as they approached us.

Unlike the theory of western painting that says that as things get closer they get more defined, Huerta’s homes stay abstract and purely geometric. As close as we feel to the idea of home - we recognize the form, understand its importance - we somehow recognize that these homes are increasingly becoming blank canvases, geometric abstractions that require us to fill in the blank.

Within this state of unsettling ambiguity, one that requires us to think carefully about what hangs before us, is a balanced and carefully composed equilibrium: clear skies, houses perfectly centered on the canvas, trees emanating from the central source, large and carefully outlined color swatches, unwavering and certain, flat, precise, and saturated areas also begin to reveal a certain discomfort when we remember where the originals come from. A sort of pictorial or aesthetic "gentrification" is taking place.

Given the realities of their actual urban surroundings and our perception of these actualities, what does this face-lift mean? The open-ended ambiguity of these homes, housing realities of our own making, highlights the function of houses everywhere - to house and shelter all sorts of things - and points directly to Huerta’s mix of the realistic and the imaginary.