The faces of work: Latino day laborers are the exclusive subject of painter John Sonsini, who grants his models the prominence—perhaps even the permanence—associated with the tradition of the portrait in oil

Seemingly coming from left field, Los Angeles artist John Sonsini has given new vigor to the traditional practice of painting portraits from the model. His subjects are not political leaders, celebrities or affluent families but Latino day laborers, whom he quickly, skillfully renders in exuberant strokes of oil paint. Stoked by intuition, as well as by insights gained from conversations with his subjects, Sonsini acknowledges his sitters' individuality. Never reductive or invasive, he captures body language and highlights details of clothing and appearance that hint at the emotional lives of immigrant workers who remain largely invisible in the economic and social currents of the city.

For an exhibition last spring at Anthony Grant, his first in New York, Sonsini presented 12 new single- and multifigure paintings of Latino workers, including one with six men, his largest and most ambitious painting to date. On the heels of that show, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, exhibited "Day Labor," a series of 20 small portrait heads produced by Sonsini during an unusual month-long project in East Hollywood. For six days a week throughout February 2005, Sonsini painted portraits in the outdoor parking lot of the Hollywood Community Job Center, home to an agency that helps laborers find employment. Each day, after the construction jobs had been assigned, one man among those left behind was selected by lottery and paid $60 to sit for a portrait. That painting would be completed in one marathon session lasting three to five hours.

For the larger images, Sonsini gravitates toward models whose clothing and hairstyles suggest an effort to assimilate into mainstream U.S. culture. Each painting is titled with the model's first name, and the back of the canvas bears his city of origin and signature. The works acknowledge the men's mixed reactions to their new lives, variously reflected in, for example, Miguel's rigid stance, Gerardo's defiant demeanor, Daniel's naive openness and Fidel's cautious gaze.

Utterly bypassing the arch posturing and cool filters of postmodern painting, Sonsini's portraits are devoid of the nasty humor of John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, the solemn allegory of Odd Nerdrum, or the grim, flesh-weighted existentialism of Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville and Marlene Dumas. Sonsini avoids the typological generalizations of Kehinde Wiley's portraits of ghetto kids and the sentimentality of Elizabeth Peyton's paintings of rock stars. Instead, his close observations reveal an empathy with the models, one checked by an awareness of his (and our) distance from their experiences. This balance results in figurative works that communicate in a surprisingly forthright yet nuanced manner. Grounded in observation, the paintings have an implicit politics, embodied in the heartfelt urgency of their facture, which underscores the humanity of these "aliens" who play a vital, if often secret, role in American life.

Sonsini emerged in the 1980s with three well-received shows of rough-and-tumble Neo-Expressionist paintings at L.A.'s Newspace Gallery. He then reevaluated his approach, taking a self-imposed nine-year sabbatical from solo exhibitions, slowly working on heavy-surfaced narrative canvases and, for a while, painting sets for male physique photographer Bob Mizer (1922-1992), known for his one-man mail-order beefcake studio, Athletic Model Guild. Mizer's command of light, attention to gleaming surfaces and use of the erotically charged gaze inspired and shaped Sonsini's interest in depicting the male figure. The artist reemerged in 1995 at Dan Bernier Gallery in Santa Monica with an exhibition of paintings of male models wearing costumes inherited from the AMG studio. These images of hunks in Marine dress, straw hats and hula skirts flaunted a sense of playful eroticism and the artist's love for thick, brushy paint.

In 1999 and 2000, Sonsini received more praise for shows, at Bernier and ACME, of paintings of a single model, Gabriel Barajas. Surveying a range of moods and stances, the Gabriel paintings subtly tracked the progress of a deepening personal relationship [see A.i.A., Oct. '99]. In these works, Sonsini was able to bypass the specific codes of the earlier costume paintings and focus more directly on the human subject, thereby intensifying his examination of the nature of masculinity.

A long-time enthusiast of Latin culture and resident of a largely Latino neighborhood, Sonsini decided to confine his practice to the depiction of Latin men. In 2001, he enlisted Barajas to help him seek out other models, focusing on the L.A. street corners where Latinos gather to find temporary work in construction and house painting. Sonsini hired sitters for a day or longer, and the resulting paintings were exhibited at ACME in 2002 and 2003.

The new group portraits (all 2004) shown at Anthony Grant feature staggered rows of heads, arms and shoes that set off horizontal compositional rhythms. In the 10-foot-wide Geovani, Louie, Gabriel, Miguel, Jorge, Gerardo, the six men eyeball the viewer with straight-on guilelessness, each appearing to stake out his own area of the canvas. They are matter-of-fact, presented without special pleading and in random poses, as if they had paused on a sidewalk. Seemingly by chance, the group has resolved into a felicitous composition, with, for example, the formal weight of the yellow shirt of Geovani, who squats on the left, balanced by the dangling red baseball cap held by Gerardo on the right.