“The artworks are mirror portals to my upbringing in America and Latin America. As an artist I have found it important to recreate realms and fantasies that describe my childhood when visiting Latin America. Inspired by immigration stories through family and videos games have cultivated my style in world building and figuration.”
-Elías Hernandez
“Bad Fellas” brings together the work of two of our all-time favorite painters: The Sacramento-based Jared Tharp & Bay Area Born & Los Angeles-based Elías Hernandez. Tharp’s playful abstraction and fragmentation of comic and pop culture lore, and Hernandez’s Latin American folklore-inspired paintings, both overlap in their shared homage to the cartoons, movies, and games that have shaped them both since their earliest years as artists.
This exhibit spans several media—from Hernandez’s richly textured oil paintings and ceramic sculpture, to Tharp’s frenetic collage-paintings, and thematically zeroes in on (but doesn’t limit itself to) all things in the realm of villains, bad guys, scoundrels, and evil-doers. The world of “Bad Fellas” is one of moonlit nostalgia & secret lairs, and the story it tells is at once familiar and distinctly new & unique.
