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

Art in America, Dec, 2005 by Michael Duncan

Sonsini's wild brushwork maps a scenic route. Gestures in broad strokes of white emphasize light along a trouser leg, forehead or shirt front. The ordinariness of the men's striped Kmart polo shirts and baggy jeans becomes extraordinary in rich, wet-on-wet paint. Stuttered marks in jet black delineate a goatee or mustache. Clunky bold curves suggest the models' work shoes, rendered over-scale and sometimes only roughly outlined or just scribbled in oil, like free-form calligraphy.

The studio walls seen behind the models are painted in large sections of pastel blue and pink, which set off the brown flesh tones of the men's faces and arms. Rapidly daubed abstract surfaces, these colored backgrounds often dissolve into areas of white gesso. In the Anthony Grant catalogue interview, Sonsini explains that he began leaving parts of the backgrounds white, inspired by the way that tonal deficiencies in Polaroid pictures often serve to highlight the main motifs. He decided to emulate these "white accidents," appreciating how they "made the central image more visually potent."

The figures in a Sonsini work typically are angled slightly toward the viewer and depicted in a kind of double perspective--as if seen from straight on and from above--that exaggerates the scale of heads, hands and feet. "Tilting the foreground," as Sonsini calls it, gives the paintings more space, and the bodies more volume and presence. The distortions make it difficult to grasp entire figures, encouraging viewers to look more closely at features of posture and clothing: the hands-in-the-pocket slouch of Jesus, the huge baggy jeans of Ruben, the blousy green print shirt of Daniel.

Subtleties of bearing and facial expression hint at emotional states and back-story narratives. In Jorge and Pedro, for instance, the tilted heads and slightly raised eyebrows of both models impart a wary self-consciousness, accented by Pedro's fingers-entwined gesture and Jorge's thumbs-in-pocket stance. Psychological tics and physical characteristics are caught with an expressionistic energy and painterly command that recall Chaim Soutine and Alice Neel. In the catalogue interview, Sonsini defines what he calls his "technical dilemma": "To remake my sitter's image without losing the spontaneity of his presence, and link up the malleable and physical properties of oil paint with the properties of likeness." (2)

"Remaking" what he sees, Sonsini is also a dedicated conduit, enabling a model to convey a personality in paint. While the casual poses may resemble those of snapshots, these canvases are decidedly not photo-based. In their painterliness, they seem the antithesis of photorealism. The tactility and evidence of gesture trump the instant, polished verisimilitude of the snapshot. Sonsini's expressive style suits the subjectivity of his observations. Yet, as products of considerable reflection, the portraits also serve as a kind of documentation. They survey ordinary men from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador who variously face their status as illegal aliens with hope, anxiety, humor, earnestness and bravado.