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ARTIST OVERVIEW
Marc Trujillo (b. 1966–) is an urban landscape painter who depicts the big box retail stores, self-service gas stations, and fast-food chains that make up a large portion of the urban environment. Free of political or moral overtones, these works function both as modern North American genre scenes (much like the 17th–century Dutch genre scenes of marketplaces, courtyards, and flower stalls) and as painterly meditations on color, light, and form.
According to art historian Andrew Forge, in Trujillo's paintings "time is rescued, transformed from loss to duration [and] absence is given presence."1 All of the places Trujillo depicts contribute to the increasingly fast-paced world in which we live, where attention spans have diminished beyond the point of no return. Trujillo, however, subverts this freneticism by capturing it in an objective, but highly aesthetic manner, that allows the viewer to experience an alternative reality present in such quotidian locales.
Although based on direct observation, Trujillo's paintings are completely synthetic and rigorously structured. While the places depicted are nominally in the Los Angeles area, they are in actuality generic environments that are familiar to most Americans. From these boxy, cookie-cutter industrial building designs, Trujillo builds compositions based on complicated arrays of angled planes and radial lines that recede into deep space.2 The depiction of light, both artificial and natural, is handled with extreme care as is the overall color balance within each painting.
Marc Trujillo exhibits nationally on both coasts and is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2008 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2001 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. The artist grew up in Albuquerque, NM, and currently resides in Los Angeles.
1. Andrew Forge, in Marc Trujillo (San Francisco: Hackett-Freedman Gallery, 1988)
2. David Pagel, "The Plainness of Plain Things," Recent Paintings by Marc Trujillo. (San Francisco: Hackett-Freedman Gallery, 2003).
