collection spotlight
John Valadez, The Ventriloquist, 1987
John Valadez, a realist painter and muralist who takes as his subject the urban landscape and people of Los Angeles, was born, raised, and continues to live in L.A. His style might be compared to that of photorealists, such as Richard Estes, who gained prominence in the 1970s. However, his work is not a purely documentary reflection of mainstream society. With his own subjective lens, Valadez focuses on the gritty reality of urban life, fashioning pictures that resonate differently with each viewer-depending on his or her own experiences and prejudices.
Beginning in the late 1970s, soon after he had completed his studies at East Los Angeles College and Long Beach State, Valadez rented a studio in downtown Los Angeles, where he worked for 15 years. He was determined to explore and develop a version of realism unlike anything he had seen before, to reflect the social and political times in Southern California. Working diligently, Valadez developed a technique using pastels that incorporated layers of pigment, built up on the paper. Years later, he discovered that his techniques were traditional, though he had developed them independently. His working style involved taking dozens of photographic slides of his surroundings, which he pored over in his studio. Eventually he settled on a topic, combining features of several photographs of the same subject into an amalgamation that he felt best represented the individual.
Unlike the prosperous West Side of Los Angeles, the downtown area faced an economic decline in the 1980s. Instead of ignoring this disparity, Valadez's desire was to present a straightforward image of the reality he knew and to elicit honest reactions from the public. His pastel portrait of a ventriloquist and his dummy, entitled The Ventriloquist, documents a particular person-a homeless man, hustling spare change by working as a street performer. The portrait also captures a particular time and place-the Reagan era of the 1980s, in downtown Los Angeles near Broadway. Composing part of a large series of pastel portraits Valadez created in the 1980s, The Ventriloquist documents a struggling individual whom the artist knew. Based upon his fascination with people in the urban landscape, he was naturally attracted to social themes and class issues, presented from an insider's point of view. His interest coincided with the increasing appearance of homeless people, many of whom had been released from mental institutions due to sharply decreased government funding. His work was designed to stimulate dialogue by showing an aspect of Southern California that many residents never encountered. "People live in their own world; they never cross the freeway," Valadez explained. "Southern California could be different countries within the same city."
Valadez's work appeared in A Sense of Place, an exhibition of three Southern Californian artists, mounted by the de Saisset Museum in 1988. Soon after, the museum purchased The Ventriloquist from Valadez's gallery in Los Angeles. When he received payment for the pastel, the artist sought out the subject of the portrait, who still lived in his neighborhood, and gave him some of the money from the sale. "He grabbed the money and ran off, he had forgotten about the pastel, and he thought I was crazy," said Valadez. "Years later, I saw him again, and he had actually turned his life around. He was married, and he had a kid; he had gotten coherent."
Now that Valadez lives with his wife and family in a more suburban setting, and takes on major commissions-the most recent one being an enormous mural in Orange County-he no longer is directly confronted with street life. However, he said, "That whole body of work is dear to me, because I was exploring and developing. The most important thing was what these pictures were telling you. I tried to present these people as people: struggling, living, and defiant."