I renounce the notion of one’s body belonging
to oneself. My body serves as the home in which
I reside, I maintain and utilize his functionality to
navigate the world. He becomes a portal for the
viewer to enter and thus to undergo a symbiotic
relationship with him.
-Devan Shimoyama, 2015

What possible connection could early ’90’s Chicano gangsters in Los Angeles have with queer Black youth from the East Coast in 2015? Approaching their subjects from opposite sides of the country, working some twenty years apart, Salomón Huerta and Devan Shimoyama independently reveal a common archetype across disparate cultures and decades. In their work, “abjectness and recovered beauty are a parallel to the messiness of being male but also being human,” as Toro Castaño observed.

They speak in the language of classical mythology and contemporary stereotype to illuminate a small fraction of what it means to be a young man in search of his own identity. The placement of these two artists in adjacent galleries reveals the explicit yet often overshadowed foundations: separating and comparing the social environment as cause and camouflage for so much of what becomes a man.

Shimoyama begins our acquaintance by defining his life as a performance and his body as a mask, then briskly gets on with the narrative. Glittering and exuberant, often despite a textual darkness, the paintings gathered for his debut exhibition in Los Angeles are purposefully stunning. Each is a self portrait in that he depicts his own body, but the depths of symbolism and narrative are hidden beneath his extravagant use of color and material. Green sequins, black glitter, crystals and neon paint, deep pools of ebony acrylic and swirls of undiluted color clamor for attention. This wealth of color and texture is draped across Shimoyama’s figures, each symbolically imbued with double and triple meaning in the sixteenth century manner.

In the painting Daphne, (detail above) Shimoyama paints himself as the titular river Nymph ardently pursued by Apollo, a tragic figure who was turned into a laurel tree rather than be captured by love or raped by an amorous god, depending on the version you read. It is a slightly longer story, but as a modern parable for denial of oneself and rejection of romantic or sexual conquest, it is remarkably applicable. In the myth there are insults and enchanted arrows; in the painting there is a laurel wreath made of green-hued eyes, identity used asdecoration to both declare and deny love from another. What story brought this composition together? Whether it was a personal experience or a fictional adaptation bears no weight; for Shimoyama, his body and image are a shared mask to be worn by artist and viewer alike.

Salomón Huerta made the paintings shown in the exhibition in the early 1990’s, when he was a similar age to Shimoyama now. These early works have not been widely seen, dating from a period just before his acclaimed run of “cooly detached” (per David Pagel) minimalist, stylized urban portraits that shot him to national attention. The paintings on view are just as taut, but more openly emotional than the later works he became known for. Raw and unfiltered, the depicted figures can be unsettling and even frightening to an outsider. The body language and the language written thereupon is meant to inform and intimidate, to immediately establish one’s place in society. Represented in Huerta’s capable hands, the message is very successful. In fact, it is the seemingly culturally-specific symbology that finds echoes in Shimoyama’s paintings. Huerta’s early work reveals the universal aspect to be the posture behind the symbol, the perpetual rephrasing of the exact same desires in very different forms.

Devan Shimoyama (Philadelphia, PA, 1989) lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A graduate of Penn State and the Yale University School of Painting, Shimoyama recently participated in the Fire Island Artist Residency, and currently holds a teaching position at Carnegie Mellon University.

Toro Castaño is a curatorial assistant at ONE Archives at USC Libraries and an independent curatorial researcher based out of Long Beach, a graduate of UC Santa Cruz with a Masters from USC. He is a contemporary art book reviewer for The Library Journal, and occasionally provides research support to Semiotext(e) founder, Sylvère Lotringer. Castaño is closely involved with the Long Beach participatory arts scene where he is a facilitator at the Institute for Labor Garments Workers and Uniforms (ILGWU) in the Art Exchange. He is currently working on The Francis Effect, a project initiated by artist Tania Bruguera.