When I think of Los Angeles in 2022, what type of artist is speaking to the moment, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr is the top of the list. There is something so familiar and yet so fresh with the body of work he is creating, and in that, there is a sense that it's about Los Angeles but not a particular LA. It's about an under the surface visual, something embedded in the city's DNA but also takes into account how the urban sprawl and fabric to the city is rewritten almost every decade. There is a soul to Gonzalez Jr's work, and in There Was There, he seems to have found an ideal balance between art and observation, internalization and visual output. 

"Since I grew up looking at screens, it impacts the way I approach a new work. I found that, when making compositions, my mind sometimes thinks about viewing them on a screen and cropping the image with the zoom option," Alfonso told us in a feature in our print edition this past Fall. "My recent work focuses on landscapes. I find a cohesive parallel with the work by imagining the environment on Google Maps. Zooming in and out, walking around the corner down the street, in and out of a building, looking up, down and around. The irony is that I’m terrible with computers and tech. I still approach the production of my work the old school way, the way I learned through sign painting."

This is a critical dialogue in which to understand what Gonzalez Jr is doing at his new show at Matthew Brown in LA. He is taking what one sees in landscapes and is picking it apart and finding pieces and often, minutiae, to investigate. That's where he goes under the surface. He is driving through LA and picking up iconography, scenes, people, urban leftovers and sometimes urban delights, to paint and reconstruct. There Was There is such an apt title because it reminds of Gertrude Stein's great line, "there is no there there" in regards to her childhood home. There can be anywhere or any place, but we all have a collective understanding that the there here is a place we understand. It's LA, its 2022, and Gonzalez Jr is the voice. —Evan Pricco