Roberto Gutiérrez: A Day’s Work
“A monument to the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into shaping our community.”
– Rafael Barrientos Martínez, Curator at the AltaMed Art Collection
In Roberto Gutiérrez: A Day's Work, the artist presents us with a recent body of images where the comings and goings normally represented as details within his works are brought to center stage. In each of the eighteen sumi ink drawings, Roberto depicts members of a work crew toiling away on what was a hot summer day outside his studio in South Pasadena. Using sinuous continuous lines that demonstrates his command of the media, the artist shows his subjects in profile or with their backs facing the viewer. In addition to this implied anonymity there is an absence of recognizable indicators of place, giving the visual description of their labor a universal quality.
These men are our neighbors, they are our cousins, they are our sobrinos, they are our gente. Seeing a correlation between his parents' efforts and their manual work, Roberto felt a profound sense of empathy and connection towards these men, supplying them with cold water while they toiled, and cold beers once they were done. A monument to the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into shaping our community, Roberto continues to call on us to see beauty in the daily occurrences and interactions that shape our everyday.
