Harper’s is pleased to present Daily Ritual, Salomón Huerta’s first exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition opens Thursday, September 8, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
Huerta’s Gun
by Michael Slenske
According to the dramatic principle known as Chekhov’s Gun: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise, don't put it there.” But what if you place a gun on a table in a still-life painting? And what if you’ve placed this same gun in dozens of paintings on a similar table, painted from different angles under different lighting scenarios, opposite different snacks that serve as markers of time in these serial compositions? What if that gun never goes off, but the tension builds with each iteration, each stroke, of these loaded mise-en-scènes? Such is the dilemma confronted by Salomón Huerta in his decade-long painting series, Daily Ritual.
From the ages of nine to sixteen, Huerta was tasked with the daily ritual of presenting a pre-supper snack to his father. Around five or six every evening, Huerta would set a fruit or a Mexican sweetbread, a glass of milk, or a bottle of beer, on the table in his parent's bedroom. Invariably, the table would be occupied by the presence of the .38 revolver his father kept in the family’s four-bedroom Boyle Heights apartment to combat any would-be threats lurking in the Ramona Gardens public housing development where they lived. Despite being a repeat victim of violence in the projects, Huerta knew never to touch his father’s firearm, even though the only real conversation he remembers having with his father was a lesson in how to clean and load the revolver when he was nine years old.
The Daily Ritual paintings capture the tension of this fraught bedroom exchange, one in which, as Huerta argues, “Anything could happen at any moment. Things could go very quiet and then it's total chaos.” For various reasons, the artist avoided painting this fraught still life until 2012, a decade-and-a-half after his father’s passing.
Despite the fact that Chris Burden, Ed Ruscha, Vija Celmins, Andy Warhol, and William S. Burroughs, among many other artists, have all portrayed or used real guns—or gunpowder—in the making of their art, none of them had to grapple with creating these works at a time when gun violence was a disgraceful national epidemic. Huerta, unlike most artists, lived with the threat of gun violence outside his door for the better part of his youth. In fact, his family arrived in Los Angeles after a blood feud forced them from Michoacán. Though he was born in Tijuana, his first memory of returning to the bustling border town was of his father strapping the revolver to his waist so they could cross the San Ysidro Port of Entry without incident. For Huerta, who has pushed the boundaries of figurative painting with his lush, if restrained, portraits of the backsides of human heads, the faces of models and musical icons, the masks of luchadores, and the profiles of American boxers, the guns were an avenue for him to tackle still life painting in the vein of Giorgio Morandi, but through his own socio-political lens.
In Huerta’s eyes—and memory—the gun was always invisible. But how do you unload such a loaded subject in the space of a painting? Morandi spent countless hours shuffling his quotidian bowls, vessels, and tablecloths into concise configurations—painting them with painstakingly muted palettes—to elevate them to a space of architecture, which they would ultimately influence.
Huerta sets about disarming his father’s pistol by giving as much weight on the canvas to a decadently rendered plum or pomegranate. Set against sumptuous monochrome backgrounds, whose palette was chosen to match those of advertisements in top fashion magazines, Huerta aims to seduce with his Daily Rituals. Their style of seduction is matched only by their trajectory of tension. As the impact of gun violence has risen over the years so has the intensity of the artist’s mark-making, with his latest suite of gun paintings all bearing a feverish smear of oil across the top of the canvas, a pained marcatissimo presiding over a spartan score of trauma writ small and large.
Though Huerta doesn’t have blinders to the current politics around the portrayal of guns in any medium, he believes that people can put aside their personal and political issues with firearms and see how his pairings, palette choices, and mark-making elevates his compositions to a discourse that is more than simply reactionary. With every work, he asks What is more dangerous: a loaded gun, or a painting of one? Who is more culpable in our culture of violence: the man who owns this gun or the society that forces him to have it? Unlike Chekhov’s trigger-happy principle, Huerta’s violent delights seem to have non-violent ends.
Salomón Huerta (b. 1965, Tijuana, Mexico) received a BFA from Art Center College of Design in 1991, and an MFA from UCLA in 1998. Most recently, his work has been exhibited at Louise Alexander Gallery, Porto Cervo, IT (2021 and 2019); California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, CA (2020); Gallery Vacancy/ltd los angeles, Shanghai (2019); Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2018); There There Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); and Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (2014). Over the course of his career, Huerta was included in notable group presentations including Home—So Different, So Appealing, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2017); Transactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2006); Retratos, El Museo del Barrio, New York, San Antonio Museum, San Antonio, and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2005-6); Lateral Thinking: Art of the 1990s, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2002); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000); and LA Current, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (1999 and 1997). His work has been acquired by numerous institutions including Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, and Los Angeles Times, among other publications. Huerta lives and works in Los Angeles.