CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/8/2013

"Yummy Goop:" Albert Contreras

Featured image is an untitled 2010 work by Albert Contreras, who won early acclaim in the 1960s, quit painting in the 1970s, spent two decades driving garbage trucks and operating heavy equipment for the city of Los Angeles, then returned to painting in 1997 after five years in psychotherapy. It is reproduced from the first substantial monograph on Contreras—published by Marquand Books—in which essayist John Yau writes, "David Pagel has described Contreras’ paintings as 'obscenely edible,' and he is absolutely right. Their thick, creamy surfaces are measured X’s of yummy goop. That collision between the lusciously physical and the vibrantly visual is at the core of these paintings. They stop just short of being lurid. They can be gaudy, bright, even garish—like a wrist full of costume jewelry—but they never cross the line, never stop being eye-catching and straightforward in their beauty. They are resilient and scarred, intrepid and exposed. They are celebrations of the serious, wacky and witty. No one else makes paintings like these."