American Purgatory

Artist Marc Trujillo distills the sterility of American consumerism into haunting snapshots of the mundane, liminal, moments that make up much of our lives.

- By Michael Pearce

Artificial food and fast lights forge cheerful islands of color against gray and darkened streets in urban paintings by Marc Trujillo, memorializing the ghastly spread of ruthlessly economical architecture in beautifully rendered glazed grisailles. Trujillo’s technical oil portraits of buildings superficially resemble Edward Hopper’s urban nocturnes but shed Hopper’s comforting harmonies of nostalgia by using cold L.E.D.’s and strip lights for illumination. Hopper’s tones are warm and jazz-like and sing tragic melodies of men and women finding themselves alone. Trujillo’s songs of San Fernando, California’s streets are cold and electric and indifferent to individuality. Hopper's buildings tell us about people. Trujillo's people tell us about buildings which, while sterile, are the only personalities in these smooth paintings.

He calls the paintings his American purgatory. If Trujillo is our Virgil, we are his Dante to guide through the indeterminate space between the edge of hell and the gate to heaven. He shows us impersonal and unhappy meals and hungry trays, cold aisles and fluorescent airports, squaretiled supermarkets, buzzing refrigerators in minor-key and melancholy pictures of unloved places and thankless food staged in a grim, concrete city. He is the lover of loveless commercial architecture.