Chicago-born, Los Angeles-based artist Sayre Gomez (b. 1982) employs a wide range of techniques, including trompe l’oeil, airbrushing, and stenciling. Drawing inspiration from the urban L.A. landscape, his semi-fictionalised and photorealistic paintings, also known as X-scapes, observe everyday life and investigate contemporary visual culture. Works simultaneously touch on the beauty of nature, the passage of time, urban decay, modern technologies, and commercial nostalgia.

Gomez synthesizes his visual observations into hyperreal images that challenge our ability to differentiate between authenticity and simulation: a cityscape that feels true-to-life might just as easily be an artificial construction. In this way, he explores the increasingly tenuous link between our everyday surroundings and a digital culture that is relentlessly driven by enhanced and manipulated images.