Selected from separate but overlapping and intergrading series painted from 2013 to 2015 (the Grid and L.A. River series), plus a number of precursors dating back to the early 1990s, the paintings range widely through degrees of figuration and abstraction, effects of color and of chiaroscuro, and the broad terrain between expressionism and impressionism, forming a protean record of the river and the city, in compositions of trees, concrete embankments, bridges, power pylons, buildings, and transportation corridors, all bathed in a vivid, changing sky. Paint is the fundamental element: raw, confident brushstrokes and thick impasto, laid down in layers and drifts, giving the canvases a dimensional surface and an insistent materiality. The effect is a rare power to capture mood, movement, and vectors of force, and to convey emotion—in a static medium. Flat surface becomes depth: concrete, buildings, dirt, water, and sky seem to move, become animate, foliate, sometimes chaotic, as in the stormy seas in Salsipuedes, 2014 (collection of David Madison). Or, in Verde, Grid series, 2012 (private collection), the sky is roiled by furies of fire reflected in the clouds. Most superlative is the light: Zayas sees it plainly and renders it so that the viewer can, too: the gauzy refraction of Southern California’s marine layer, the gloom

of winter clouds, the ironic aesthetic pleasures of our region’s air pollution—the dirty smoggy browns of midsummer, too-vivid orange sunset skies, and preternatural glows of the city at night. The light, captured in heavy, swirling layers of oil, captures the city’s moods, stresses, and sometimes, sublimity.

Zayas was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and grew up in the West Coast city of Mazatlán. He came to San Diego in 1977 as a high school student, continuing on to receive his BFA there at United States International University. In 1981, at the age of 18, he set off for Europe, with only enough money for two weeks, yet intent on making his pilgrimage to the great repositories of Western art. At the end of the first week, on the Costa Brava in Spain, he donned his swim trunks and took to the beach, painting plein air watercolor landscapes which he sold to passersby. “I stayed alive for six months, just doing watercolors,” he said. And he traveled. He saw Velásquez and the drawings and “black paintings” of Goya at the Prado in Madrid. Elsewhere he saw Rembrandt, Titian, Whistler, Turner, Çezanne, Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Soutine—some of the artists he has cited as major influences, visiting every major museum in Europe below its northern tier. It was a life-changing experience—seeing the work in person, and earning his bread with his brush. “I knew I wanted to do this for the rest of my life, but it put a stamp on it, it gave me permission.”

He trained his eye and his hand, filling hundreds of sketchbooks, thousands of sheets. After the random murder of one of his teachers, Dwight Harmon, he recoiled from the conventional art world, and from 2005−2007 rented a studio in South Central L.A., in one of the city’s most violent neighborhoods, operating a small café and teaching drawing classes for local kids. His process was always foremost, of engagement with what was around him. In the middle of L.A.’s worst gang violence, the era of movies like Colors and Boyz in the Hood, Zayas practiced plein air painting, hauling large canvases to the concrete riverbank and painting in the back of a pickup truck, with a baseball bat at his side. He was threatened by gang members, and once shot at while painting on his rooftop at night in the rain, with an umbrella and a light reflector, from a car driving across the First Street bridge over the L.A. River. Bullets cracked the concrete next to him. After taking a break to calm his nerves with wine, he finished the painting that night. His then-neighbor in the Brewery complex, the artist John McCracken, said wryly, “Everyone’s a critic.” Neither critics nor bullets would keep Zayas from making his art, his way.

In between teaching and living in L.A. there were trips to work under other skies: to Mérida, in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, where he painted landscapes of dry riverbeds and stands of trees in twilight; a nearly two-year residence on a remote ranch in the state of Michoacán, an area without light pollution, where he read books on astronomy and made studies of star formations, drawing while looking through a telescope. Then he translated the drawings to a series of welded metal sculptures he called “astrophysiological sculptures” made of oblique lines, “connecting the dots,” and giving two-dimensional constellations three-dimensional, physical form.

These and other Mexican artistic experiences, to say nothing of his own personal and family heritage, reinforced his respect for that country’s artistic wellsprings. The influence of Rivera, Siquieros, and Orozco isn’t hard to spot in the work—in his often dark palette, disregard of academic stylistic norms, and confrontation with physical reality, with the city as a stage for a hard-edged urban landscape and the human figure. Zayas is, in one sense, a  Mexican artist, but he is equally an American one; irreducibly, he is a Los Angeles artist, practicing a fusion of styles across an astonishing range of media. It has been suggested that he is more a sculptor than a painter. Though this is a needless distinction, one can see the justice in the suggestion, insofar as his sculpture and painting alike are aimed at multiplying dimensions: the star sculptures by exploding the earthbound watcher’s view of a constellation by building it in three dimensions; the paintings by revealing the three-dimensionality of space by capturing its dynamics and energy in paint. 

Suffusing all of the work is an unrestrained romanticism, a celebration in paint of the aesthetic and emotional potential of the city and its stacked and layered physical forms and shifting moods.

One recent chronicler of the urban form of Los Angeles wrote that “infrastructure is the only theology that really took hold in the American West.”   Nowhere is this more true than in Los Angeles, and no Los Angeles artist has explored this fundamental fact more than Victor Hugo Zayas, while living for 29 years within sight of the L.A. River, including 6 years at his current studio, a cavernous metal shed hard up against the railroad tracks perched on the east bank, steps downstream from the Main Street bridge, across from a sprawling Department of Water and Power electrical yard and kitty-corner from a cement plant serviced by an endless file of mixer trucks. Inside, the booming engines and horns of slowly passing locomotives and the rattle of rail cars regularly shake the walls and drown out conversation. Hundreds of works, sculptures cheek by jowl with paintings hanging from the high metal ceiling and stacked against every wall, record his engagement with, and interrogation of, what he sees every day: industry and infrastructure, power lines, bridges, lights, warehouses, locomotives, trucks, and always, the concrete flood control channel that replaced the Los Angeles River.  Here is the true history and substance of L.A.: how it came to dominate California and the West Coast in a location unfavored by nature—walled off from the rest of the country by soaring mountain walls and vast deserts, without perennial water, timber, coal, or harbors—by ruthlessly building what it lacked: aqueducts to bring water from hundreds of miles away, railroads and seaports to connect it to the rest of the continent and the world, distant powerplants and transmission cables to light it, the world’s most massive highway network to sew its thousands of square miles together, and most recently, airports and the largest train, truck, and warehouse distribution complex in North America, to re-tool its regional economy from factory production to post-industrial global logistics hub. All of this allowed,  and continues to allow, Southern California’s “growth machine” of land developers, banks, brokers, politicians, and administrators to pursue the region’s main line of business—selling real estate on an epic and seemingly unending scale. Infrastructure has been the source of L.A.’s wealth and its physical reality—and is the map of its limitations.

In recent years, the L.A. River has been transformed, in part by the attention and efforts of serious artists living and working next to it. It has gone from being a joke (What is the indicator species of the L.A. River? A shopping cart.) and the resort of the homeless, gangs, and graffiti artists, to emerging as the central strand in the city’s attempt at remaking its self-identity in a paradoxically “green” mode. Billions are set to be spent upgrading it, possibly “restoring” it—though to what earlier state is an open question, as the River is far less a natural phenomenon now than a cultural one, and above all, unavoidably, an infrastructural one. It remains an indispensable flood control channel, without which millions of people in L.A. County could not live and work where they do. In the winter rainy season, the river remains dangerous, capable of flooding out tens of square miles of a city unprepared for its occasional violent surges. In the long summer it is a rare note of flowing water in a drought-stressed region—even though its flow in the dry season consists almost entirely of treated sewage. California’s latest four-year drought has only intensified the spotlight on the need to reassess the River’s role in keeping Los Angeles habitable. It is now at the center of the question of our survival in this volatile place—a landscape equally capable of drought and flood, just as it is of horrific violence and arresting, sometimes appalling beauty.

The vantage point is above the city’s surface: a long practice of the artist of painting from rooftops or ridges in nearby Elysian Park at night to capture lights (as in East Los Angeles, 2004, in this show), which was reinforced more recently by an experience of flying into the city over its endless, torquing grids—captured in the painting LAX, 2012, which began the protean Grid series seen here in full flower.

In these skies is an almost-photographic record of the city’s connections and connectedness, its human and mechanical hum and thrum. In the riverscapes is a testament to its insistent natural vitality: clumps of willow trees twist and lick upward like wind-driven flames, some turned the burnt yellow-orange of winter—reminding that L.A. indeed has seasons. The canvases, along with the sculptures, are the products of a mature and confident artist whose commitment to his practice and engagement with his surroundings has formed a body of work that must be recognized as a major achievement.