Darren Reid. North Mill, 2012; acrylic on canvas; 23.6 x 23.6 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

North Mill (2012) is a rendition of the view outside his house at the time he began to paint. Prior to his artistic practice, works of old painting masters such as Caravaggio, Canaletto, and Holbein held an allure for Reid. “The skill required to render something so perfectly in paint always fascinated me,” Reid explains. Referencing Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) as an example of work that inspired a love for intricate craftsmanship, Reid is also drawn to the genre for its documentary value, especially in this post-photography age.

Darren Reid. The Things We Leave Behind, 2013; acrylic on canvas; 31.4 x 31.4 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

For example, in The Things We Leave Behind (2013), Reid wanted to capture the destruction generated by the rapid development happening in his local environment. In painting, the technical rigor required to render a realistic image demands a concomitantly higher level of attention from the viewer; it calls for a deeper engagement with the subject matter at hand. And even though the current fad in contemporary painting encourages more abstract forms, the interest Reid’s work has garnered thus far indicates that skill is still an appreciated quality in art.

Darren Reid. Before the Storm, 2015 (detail); acrylic on canvas; 55.1 x 27.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Reid’s process is simple but laborious. He begins by taking a number of photographs of scenes and landscapes that are familiar to him, and then selects the image that he finds most technically challenging. In the process of making Before the Storm (2015), for instance, Reid meticulously outlined every detail in the image before he painted it, and the result is a picture-perfect depiction of a harbor in Brixham, uncanny in its photographic quality. The question Reid faces is this: Why create paintings identical to photographs when he could paint from imagination? For Reid, his painting practice might be labeled as photorealist, but his interpretation of the images he chooses to paint has a narrative quality not always prevalent in photographs.

Darren Reid. Before the Storm, 2015; acrylic on canvas; 55.1 x 27.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Reid spends 200–250 hours on each painting. Works such as Sunrise, I Left You Sleeping (2015), with its challenging composition of minuscule proportions, reveal the artist’s knack for perfecting the details. For a self-taught painter who has had no formal training in painting, the skill and dexterity with which Reid produces his work is formidable. In some ways, the lack of an art education has been liberating for Reid, who started painting out of a simple desire to fill his homebound time, with no real regard for the art market and its demands. Described as “emotionally quiet,” Reid’s paintings reflect the inherent calmness in the act of painting.

Darren Reid. Sunrise, I Left You Sleeping, 2015; acrylic on canvas; 62.9 x 33.4 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Darren Reid is an artist based in Belper, England. His work is focused on contemporary realism painting, for which he was shortlisted for the John Ruskin Prize in 2014. Reid is represented by Plus One Gallery in London.

Ramiro Gomez. No Splash (after David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash, 1967), 2013; acrylic on canvas; 96 x 96 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Osceola Refetoff.

Gomez foregrounds what Mierle Laderman Ukeles referred to as “maintenance labor” in her foundational performance action Hartford Wash (1973). Ukeles performed and foregrounded the invisible labor of the maintenance class in the museum, using her position as a featured artist to introduce these issues. Gomez’s interventions have so far been more anonymous. He has inserted the silhouettes of house cleaners, gardeners, nannies, and pool attendants into public spaces as a form of political protest. Like Ukeles, he tends to limit the laborer’s presence to that of a simulacrum, more symbolic than substantive. At Charlie James Gallery, Gomez moves beyond politicized representations into identification with his subjects as individuals. By giving his caregivers and landscapers names and fragments of backstory, he attempts to differentiate them from others who share their experiences.

Ramiro Gomez. Woman Cleaning Shower in Beverly Hills (after David Hockney’s Man Taking Shower in Beverly Hills, 1964), 2013; acrylic on canvas; 36 x 36 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Osceola Refetoff.

The paintings in the gallery are a different sort of intervention, in that they are potential objects of subterfuge within the traditional narratives of an institutional collection. Gomez’s public interventions have addressed political ends such as passage of the Dream Act directly, but his appropriations of Hockney’s popular images of Los Angeles belong in museum collections because they are directly in dialogue with modernism as a style associated with invisible labor and visible affluence. Though named, Gomez’s figures are interchangeable in a way reminiscent of mid-century figuration after abstraction. Latin American artists’ limited role within the official history of modernism does not extend to Pop Art or New Realism, 1960s styles associated with Hockney that continue to resonate today. By claiming these deceptively artless styles, Gomez reinvigorates them with some of the charge they inspired in earlier decades. These paintings are informed by the reality of casual labor, which Gomez’s casual style reinforces. At the same time, Domestic Scenes comments on our “post-racial” tendency to conflate very different communities when accounting for representation at the institutional level. When Gomez substitutes a Mexican matron with a squeegee for the gay white man at the heart of Hockney’s Man in Shower in Beverly Hills (1964), he renders the absurdity of utopian “diversity thinking” starkly apparent.

Ramiro Gomez. Instructions for Leticia, 2013; acrylic, ink, and crayon on panel;
22 x 15 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Osceola Refetoff.

A collection of works on magazine paper introduce domestic help into scenes of luxury, fashion, and entertainment. In these, the painted figures don’t blend in, and the works read in a more binary and symbolic way as a result. Here the deliberate artlessness of the paintings feels less intentional. Paintings in the rear gallery are detailed enlargements of notes to nannies and housekeepers. Gomez’s own experience as a nanny in Los Angeles prompts him to give each of his archetypal laborers their own names and stories. Even so, because their narratives are entirely related to their labor status, we learn little of their individuality.

It’s easy to critique devalued labor within the aspirational excesses of design and fashion photography, as many of the works’ viewers won’t recognize themselves in the environs of the 1% either. It’s more provocative to level that critique at the history of contemporary painting in museum collections, and at the figure of the artist as one elevated by social capital rather than labor conditions. It may be a matter of time before Gomez can reconcile his social-realist stripes with his casualist leanings to create art that is as progressive as his politics. His first solo gallery show is a promising indicator of his future direction as a painter.

Domestic Scenes is on view at Charlie James Gallery through March 8, 2014.