Walk with me: Discount for Ugly People
Jorge Torrealba has a free show at One Gallery and it’s gorgeous
So I was wandering the streets of Tribeca, as you do, and came across a vibrant sandwich board in banana yellow marker that said DISCOUNT FOR UGLY PEOPLE with a big orange arrow. There was a cluster of mold-yellow balloons festooning the sign and a weird balloon person with asymmetrical eyes and a fangish smile wearing a yellow-ballon t-shirt. A cartoon cutout of the same person swaggering like an old-school watch fence held open a brown jacket to reveal an “I (heart) ART” t-shirt and a QR code. The Venezuelan-born artist (who may have been the model both for the cartoon cutout and the balloon person) stood nearby, laughing and waving people in to his first art show, which had just been extended another week. He switched fluidly between Spanish and English and was super friendly.
In true New Yorker fashion, I ducked inside without talking to him.
Inside, the gallery was high-ceilinged and pleasantly air conditioned. Does it matter? Probably, since the art was priced from $35 for swag (lots and lots of swag available) to $8500 for some of the slightly larger pieces.
The art is absolutely spot-on for an afternoon where you’re also going to test local fad bakeries (Dominique Ansel has a cookie shot) and weird NYC drinks. In fact, if you do the drinks for brunch, followed by the bakery with coffee, you might find yourself wanting to own one of these paintings. The color palate is vibrant and bold. The images are whimsical, and hidden in most of the paintings is a familiar NYC landmark. I was gleeful, trying to guess what the landmarks were without looking at the title cards.
(Personally, I thought the bull was spot-on. Given that most tourists are obsessed with photographing the body part that makes a bull not a steer, this painting is perhaps the most inside-joke NYC of the NYC-series, though the Lower Manhattan rat came a close second for me.)
Another series features elaborate detailed canvases that you can stare at and discuss, with a nod to Fauvism and a full-on embrace of comic art. These are larger and bolder and reflect back to the entry-signage with overlapping imagery that’s both fun to look at and possibly easy to overlook. There is an ease to Torrealba’s art that makes you want to share it with people.
Torrealba’s NYC is full of love. It is groundless, ridiculous, passionate love for a City that has been lived in for ten to twenty years — the artist’s ability to show both the dark underbelly and the surface tourist sites with equal passion show that he is indeed a real New Yorker, but one that has not yet become jaded. He is able to embrace it all, it’s just NYC in all her glory. And wow is it fun to look at through Torrealba’s eyes.
The entryway nods to the shallow desire of the tourist to be involved and included: there are “ugly selfie” mirrors that distort your image. They have instructions that invite the viewer to post on Instagram, and one wonders if that is part of the joke. Is Torrealba laughing at the selfie-tourist or is he egging them on? Maybe both — this room is full of ways to gratify your simplest desires: a real, half-eaten donut near the swag makes you wonder at the seriousness of it all. But then Torrealba breezes through and engages and you realize it was probably literally forgotten there. Laughter is appropriate in this room. No snooty curators looking down their coked-up nose in this gallery. It just the artist and his work, loving the madness of the City.
One aspect of this gallery show that I’ve not seen before is that each piece has a small photograph of the artist en plain air — you get to see the creation of the art, the artist, and the finished art itself — as if the delight the artist found sitting near these landmarks and having tourists ask him about his art-in-progress has been transformed into part of the art itself. His artist statement, hung in both Spanish and English at the focal point of the gallery, echoes this sentiment.
“Discount for Ugly People,” is a celebration of all things tourist-NYC, the shallowness of it all taken on in comic book glee. It’s definitely worth a walk-through on a hot end-of August day. You can find the show at One Art Space at 23 Warren Street on view until Friday, August 27th. Free admission. Weekdays from 1–6 pm & Weekends from 1–5pm.
