Untitled
2010
Acrylic on panel, (9 panels, each 12" x 14") overall 36" x 42"
Photo: courtesy Peter Mendenhall Gallery

It seems hardly possible that painter Albert Contreras' present could be more intriguing than his past, but it is. The Los Angeles-born, Santa Monica-based artist, now 77, made a name for himself in the 1960s after moving to Sweden and painting increasingly reductivist abstractions. "I wanted to paint myself into oblivion," he recalls today, "and I did... I reached the end of the line." Discouraged with his bleak monochromes, he stopped painting in 1972, moved back to the US, and for the next 20 years worked as a sanitation truck driver for the City of Los Angeles. After he retired, he began five years of psychotherapy, which he credits with spurring him to start painting again in 1997. Turning his 500-square-foot apartment into a factory for geometric abstraction, he painted seven days a week: eye-boggling grids and checkerboards in gonzo color combinations, the paint often mixed with glitters and interference pigments. Exuberant, unabashed eye candy, the work was quickly picked up by Daniel Weinberg in LA and Bill Maynes in New York, and featured in a major exhibition at The University of Southern California. The painter was invited back to Sweden for a series of shows and began showing with Peter Mendenhall in Los Angeles. All the while, the twinkly grids poured out of him in feverish prolificacy and variation.

Then, last spring, on a lark, he tried something very different. After slathering two layers of paint on a wooden panel, he took a saw tooth-grooved spatula and, in a burst of energy, raked a defiant "X" across the picture plane, exposing the layers of color beneath. When the piece dried, it looked as if a bear had clawed its way through a giant piece of bubblegum. The simplicity and physicality of the gesture were in marked contrast to the fastidiousness of his geometric compositions and rekindled a latent fascination with action painting. Galvanized, he made more X's, defying the counsel of friends who didn't like the new work. Unlike the grid paintings, the X's celebrated the artist's hand, but Contreras also felt they symbolized something universal and democratic. He posted a video to YouTube demonstrating exactly how he makes the X paintings, so that anyone in the world, with proper materials, could replicate them. He found this strangely liberating.

A further epiphany came when he lined up nine X's in three rows--three across and three down--and adhered them with wood glue and strap clamps. "Somehow I felt when I put nine of them together, it became the Holy Grail. When you have nine of them exactly, it becomes so right, so correct, so perfect. I don't know why it captivates me so much. There's a mystery about it." Part of that mystery may owe to Contreras' frequent speculation about how many works he would have painted had he not taken a 25-year break. He believes there is a given number of geometric paintings he would have created had he worked steadily from the 1970s through the 1990s. Since restarting his career, he has been on a mission to paint that same theoretical number of paintings during a radically condensed period. "A phantom was pushing me," he says, "like Death in Bergman's 'The Seventh Seal,' and he was saying, 'Come on Albert! You've got to catch up! You've got to get to the end before I get you!" Contreras says that as recently as two years ago, he felt he had not yet caught up, but now, with the advent of his X series, "I know if Death knocks on my door tonight, I'll have reached the end in time." It is as if his lineup of three panels by three panels were an oversized tic-tac-toe board with every box filled in with an X, completing the game in every conceivable direction--and winning.

A solo show of recent works by Albert Contreras was on view at Peter Mendenhall Gallery in Los Angeles, from March 20 - May 1, 2010.www.petermendenhallgallery.com<.i>