Enio Arroyo Gomez’s 'Ladrón' Finds a Home in Queens

Summary

Costa Rican artist Enio Arroyo Gomez’s 'Ladrón de casas' takes over an Astoria billboard as part of SaveArtSpace’s Looking In public art initiative.

Blending childlike imagination with themes of migration, displacement and belonging, the work explores our complicated relationship with home.

Words by Matilda Berke

Above an unassuming triangular parking lot in Astoria, Queens, the newest installation in SaveArtSpace’s public art initiative Looking In features Costa Rican painter and sculptor Enio Arroyo Gomez’s Ladrón de casas (2018): a depiction of a chimerical bug-eyed figure which, even as he flees with a townhouse in his hand, turns back to face the viewer while he gestures at his prize. At first glance, the image simply suggests the accessible, relatable product of a fanciful imagination. But upon closer inspection, the creature’s posture and expression—coupled with its slightly off-kilter placement in its surreal, tightly framed setting—make it harder to pin down. Curator and award-winning artist Jessica Alazraki selected this work from Gomez’s Bestiario series, which hybridizes medieval bestiaries (encyclopedic compendia of real and imagined animals) with broader themes and techniques in the artist’s own practice as well as his day job as a children’s art teacher.

Gomez, who architects his school’s classrooms to promote freeform experimentation and maximize his students’ creativity, similarly designs his curriculum around the kind of automatic drawing that guides his own work. Like his deceptively complex Ladrón, his art is not as naïve as it initially appears. (As Meyer Schapiro writes in “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs,” “the figure appears anomalous, displaced, even spiritually strained… the self-constrained posture and other elements of the image work to reinforce an expression of the brooding and withdrawn. The tendency to favor an off-center position has been noticed in the drawings of emotionally disturbed children.”) Gomez’s lines, which he learned from a Chamacoco artist in Paraguay and exercises routinely as he teaches, deliberately come to resemble those drawn by a child. His early Bestiario works were made before he could afford proper canvases. The coarse, raw sheets upon which these mythical beasts are rendered resemble their rough clothes: a material choice driven by both economics and chance that grounds these endearing monsters in the harsh realities of our world. 

Like many of Gomez’s paintings, Ladrón de casas, which translates to “burglar/house thief” or—most literally—“thief of houses,” extends the artist’s psychoanalytic approach to play as a means of accessing subconscious impulses: a representation of art as a double-facing window into the self and onto a broader spectrum of experience. The rounded rectangular billboard in which Ladrón rests just so happens to resemble the industrial architecture of a bus or subway window, suggesting a commuter lifestyle or mobile society. The small painted plants near the creature’s feet mirror a tree that slightly overlaps the right side of the installation, emphasizing the persistent presence of the organic world even in his strange urban landscape—and in our own. 

“These experiences of forced migration manifest themself in the alienated ‘house thief’ and his strange, unsteady environment.

These synchronicities represent powerful examples of art’s capacity to alchemically transform the personal into the universal by visualizing unconscious feelings. Gomez has been near-constantly on the move after leaving his childhood home; these experiences of forced migration manifest themself in the alienated “house thief” and his strange, unsteady environment. In January 2020, shortly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, patron and collector Viljon Caka randomly stumbled into the Buenos Aires gallery in which he first encountered Ladrón, which would become the first piece in (and the emotional core of) his Pensofino Collection. Although Caka was completely unfamiliar with the art world at the time of its discovery, he immediately connected with this painting; as an Albanian immigrant, he found his own experience reflected in Gomez’s implicit self-portrait, which Caka submitted for SaveArtSpace’s consideration on the artist’s behalf. Like the archetypal bestiary entries of history, each of which typically included a symbolic description of the animal at hand designed to impart a certain moral lesson, the figure of the “house thief” conveys the displacement and instability of a nomadic lifestyle imposed by tenuous conditions. 

In this particular context, this vulnerable monster resonates even more closely with SaveArtSpace’s mission. Just as our eponymous thief appears trapped by the boundaries of the canvas, the larger image is itself fenced in by the billboard’s metal perimeter. Yet even within these constraints, he manages to exercise certain subversive forms of power. The extant billboard next to SaveArtSpace’s (a parallel frame, completely identical in size and shape, that surrounds run-of-the-mill commercial content) reminds us that this artwork is effectively “stealing” advertisement space. The position of this installation in Astoria—a historical meeting point for different cultures, including Greek, Italian, Albanian, Egyptian, and Lebanese immigrant communities—reinforces Gomez’s desire to reframe reality through personal expression. On the walls of the underpass that supports the Ladrón, towering figures from Greek mythology have been rendered by students from the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts; Gomez has led similar mural projects in the past. Though SaveArtSpace selects its project locations purely based on visibility, it is another happy coincidence that this international artist finds a home in such an international community. 

In the painting itself (which was actually stretched and framed in a shop in Astoria, where Caka himself used to live), the flimsy, colorful towers of skyscrapers that surround the Ladrón suggest a whimsical vision of a city as a series of stacked blocks, like a child’s dream of New York. This playful depiction hints at deeper truths of urban planning: like Gomez’s own classrooms, cities are specifically designed to encourage certain ways of seeing and living. By carving out specific space for cultural encounters that might otherwise be inaccessible, public art initiatives encourage us to look more closely at the daily textures of our lives, allowing us to steal glimpses at worlds both inside and outside ourselves.