A new painting by Rafael Gomez Luna
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| Eagle Eye Rafael Gomez Luna 2016 |
The Children's School in Park Slope is one of the best grade schools in the city. It feels like a private school when you walk in. But this is PS 372, which just had its annual fundraising gala and art auction. "My daughter is in a class of twenty-five, and they have six teachers, for 25 children," Rafael Gomez Luna tells me. "We are really lucky to have her in this school, and I am grateful, really grateful. That's why I do so much for the school."
Rafael Gomez Luna's profile on this site
The school's district takes in Gowanus and parts of Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. So the parents are wealthy and not so wealthy. They are native New Yorkers and transplants. Rafael himself is a confluence of worlds. He went to elite schools in the Dominican Republic, where he was raised as the foster son of a wealthy family. He is one of hundreds of "godsons" of the former dictator Trujillo, a fact that leant Rafael Gomez some cover in the waning years of the 30-year regime. "There were family godsons and political godsons, I was a political godson," Rafael says with a worldly laugh.
After a stint at a military prep school, Rafael rejected a career in the army, and rejoined his biological parents in Manhattan. First to Chelsea, then to Washington Heights. It was the roiling 70s and 80s. Washington Heights was Latin, and still is. But at that time, there were landed Italian and Sicilian families who controlled most of the nightlife across the metropolitan area. "I was all over the Italian scene, but that was citywide," says Rafael, as distinct from the Heights. "There were very few Italians in the Heights."
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| The Green Building, Union Street, Gowanus photo: the green building |
Today, Rafael is as typical a New Yorker as any you can find in any neighborhood. You could call him a metropolitan New Yorker, as I myself am, who have family roots in NewYork. albeit no personal connection until my late twenties. Rafael came to the city when he was eighteen. And today he is a painter, an activist, a food-coop squad leader, and passionately dedicated father.
We stroll along Union Street in Gowanus, and Rafael elaborates on the fusion of haut-bohemian aesthetics and designer real estate in this most hot of gentrifying neighborhoods. The next minute he tells me about how he dispatched a gang that attempted to jump him and his wife on this street a decade or more ago. "Initiation ritual," he says. "Let's just say they were very surprised by my reaction." Another worldly laugh. "They took off."
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| The Children's School, Carroll Street, Gowanus photo: Brooklyn Catholic |
The painting Eagle Eye can hang any way you like, it's an aerial view. And it's sold, auctioned off at the school fundraiser. This and two others by Rafael have found their ways onto walls in Brooklyn. A very small painting on a thick frame, which floats about 10,000 feet over the earth. It is about space, boundless space, and also contracting space, vanishing space for artists in Gowanus.
Rafael's paintings, which he signs "Siri," are comments on what a painting is, on its coinage in our present place and time. And at the same time, a comment on its pictorial distance from our place and time. In these paintings, the pictorial is always allowed to fall back into inscrutable landscapes. The paintings are crafted in the round, "tamped in well," as it were, from several perspectives. It is the compressed, spring-loaded space of Rafael Gomez Luna. Who has a gamely approach to the mysterious moment.
— Ethan Pettit, 16 May 2016
