Raul Gonzalez

If this is your first introduction to his work, you might be surprised to find out that artist Raul Gonzalez lives just down the street from me in Somerville, MA. His drawings seem almost palpably gritty with the dust of a distant border town. But he has in fact lived here in the Boston area for the better part of the last decade. I bump into Raul on occasion on my way to or from work (him riding a bike, or pushing little Raulito around in a stroller; me on my adult scooter that almost certainly makes me look like the largest doofus in Somerville, but Raul is kind enough to talk to me, anyways). Needless to say, I haven’t chosen to write about him because of our similar commuting schedule, but because of an apparently bottomless series of drawings he’s been working on which might wreck any expectations you might have of a Boston artist (well, if you have any such expectations).

Raul clearly read a lot of comic books and watched a lot of cartoons when he was a kid (and, I’m guessing, into adulthood as well). Having digested these influences thoroughly, he has been creating an entirely new and strange language in his recent drawings. While distantly referencing such greatest hits from your childhood as Looney Toones and MAD magazine, there’s a seriousness, gruesomeness, and occasional sadness to his work which gives them a weight well beyond their influences. Like the comics he’s inspired by, Raul likes to tell a story. His drawings star a motley cast of characters: broken down boxers shambling through Wile E. Coyote’s desert landscape; Indians, recently escaped from vaguely (or overtly) racist cartoons from the previous century, only to find a reality that isn’t much better; buffaloes, dogs, and chickens let loose from Mad Magazine to live ferally; disembodied hands, hearts, eyeballs, and hairdo’s, removed from their owners through violence both very cartoony and very real.

Raul grew up drawing comics, which you can tell. But there is a real mastery to his craft in his handling of materials. A lot of Raul’s drawings look like they were literally made with dirt and blood. Some seem to be smeared with coffee, scribbled with crayons (Raulito, is that you?), or finely detailed with gold leafing. I haven’t really talked with Raul about the content of his work, but you can probably get a sense for certain things. To the best of my knowledge, he grew up in Texas, with family on the other side of the border. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. While some of the symbols he uses are mysterious and murky, others are brutally direct.

I’ve known about Raul’s work for a while – he’s a founding member of  The Miracle 5, a local art collective/group of superheroes (or maybe supervillains?) which has made a name for itself around town. But I only had the opportunity to meet him and see his work in person for the first time a couple years ago, when we showed together in a summer exhibition in the Tufts University Gallery. His work happened to be right next to mine, although by “happen” I probably mean “deliberately placed by the curator.” Although our styles are clearly very different, Raul tells stories with his art, using characters created from a hodgepodge of childhood influences. They’re sometimes genuinely funny and sometimes genuinely sad. If you’ve come to this blog because you’re familiar with my paintings, these will be ideas you recognize.

Recently Raul has worked on a pair of mural projects, one on view at the San Francisco Art Institute, and another at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (an old and esteemed institution not much known for it’s acknowledgement of local artists). You might expect the transition from small scale drawings to fairly enormous murals to be a challenge, but nothing about these murals gives any sense that it was a hardship for Raul. He’s also done a number of projects with local children (in Boston and elsewhere), and is seriously invested in community action in a way that makes me overwhelmingly aware of, and embarrassed by, my own state of apathetic laziness. In addition to the ongoing mural projects mentioned above, Raul will be showing in “75 artists, 75 years” at the ICA in Boston in September (another local institution not so easy to get into), and is featured in “Close Distance,” a show of Boston area Latino artists, in the Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts (up until August 30th). He is represented by Caroll and Sons. His resume is starting to make me jealous, so I’m going to quit while I’m ahead.

To see more of his work, check out a selection below, or go to his website cerebot.blogspot.com