Diego Cardoso is painting L.A. as it really moves, one street at a time
One afternoon this spring, the artist Diego Cardoso traced the light. We were standing inside his downtown Los Angeles studio as he explained the origin of 'Here Comes the Sun,' a painting of literal and metaphorical intersections.
'These are very old streets in the midst of Lincoln Heights, which was the center of the east side,' he says, tracking his finger up and down the crosswalk in the artwork. 'If there was an East L.A., it was born here.'
As with many of Cardoso's paintings, which swell with color and share a gentle wonder in who and how they illuminate, it first stopped me in my tracks, and then asked me to consider its meaning.
'Here Comes the Sun' is a depiction of Los Cinco Puntos, or 5 Points, a cultural core for eastsiders that braids the intersections of Indiana Street, Lorena Street and East Cesar Chavez Avenue. Deep, rich yellows and soft sea-greens overflow across the canvas, resonant in layers of acrylic and oil. Shadows lean forward denoting time passed. One woman stands at the lip of the sidewalk, waiting to cross. East L.A. is where Cardoso, who is 73, came of age as an artist. 'That was the gateway,' he says of the neighborhood.
Cardoso was raised in a family of creative professionals. His father was a journalist who co-founded Ondas Azuayas, one of the first radio stations in Cuenca, Ecuador, the city where Cardoso was born. The family later opened a record store that was run by his mother. 'Everything was vinyl,' he says. Art was always in Cardoso's orbit, and much later, as he honed his craft, initially as a photographer before painting captured his eye, he fell into the universe of David Hockney, who became a foundational influence. But where Hockney's L.A. is all about remove and the fantasy of utopia, Cardoso's L.A. lives among the people, places and scenes that drive the city.
Points of connectivity are the great theme of his artistic witness. It is a witness informed by his nearly 30 years as a city employee for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Cardoso started out as a project assistant in 1993; by 2022, the year he left, he'd climbed the ranks to executive officer. It was his position from within Metro, helping to expand L.A. into new corridors, that afforded him a special perspective of the city's architectural fabric.
In 2022, as Cardoso was set to speak at a community meeting in South Los Angeles about the Slauson Corridor project, he was hit by a car while crossing the street. 'It almost killed me,' he says. During the six months it took to recover, he decided to retire and focus on his art full time. 'I had been painting before the accident, but not at the magnitude that I am now.'
Cardoso's paintings are littered with artifacts to L.A.'s past and present: Mission Road, King Taco, LAX, wide stretches of the 101. His touchpoints are framed by spectacular gushes of light and shadow, a near mystical sense of color, all of which negotiate the way we see, and thus remember. In the wholeness of what Cardoso has invited us into, his bright intersections of a city and its people on the move, a profound convergence takes shape.
Jason Parham: What is your earliest memory of art?
Diego Cardoso: It was of my dad photographing. I was maybe 9 years old. My dad went to university and became a lawyer but never practiced law. He got involved in journalism, and the camera was a part of that. He purchased a Kodak, a film camera. He was not necessarily photographing us, the family or anything like that; his canvas was the city where we lived, Cuenca. That was my first experience with images, and what it meant to focus on them.
JP: Los Angeles is a town of images. Hollywood was built on the fortune of what they promise. But they also have the capacity to haunt, especially for locals who grew up here and hold on to a picture of what L.A. used to be. How has the city shaped how you see as an artist?
DC: I arrived in L.A. when I was 18 years old. I came because I had uncles that had moved here. My parents and two siblings never migrated. Those were the years of the Beatles. This was 1969. I came here and I said 'Wow, what a place.' I settled in Pico-Union and later Boyle Heights. The area was in transition. At that time it felt more like a suburb of L.A. I loved the cultural experience that I encountered. My relationship to the city changed when I discovered the buses on Wilshire Boulevard that would go to the beach, to Santa Monica, which was paradise to me. I said, 'This is it.' I would take R.T.D. whenever I had a chance.
JP: Those bus trips were special to you.
DC: They opened the city. To travel from where we lived to get to Santa Monica took about an hour. But the bus went through a lot of neighborhoods: Mid-City, the Fairfax district, sections of Century City, Beverly Hills, UCLA, Santa Monica, and then the ocean. So it was like traveling in many cities. And that was my impression of L.A. — the multicultural, multi-experience of a city.
JP: A major theme in your work is mobility. Is that where it comes from?
DC: Yes and no. Yes in the sense that I got very interested in how cities work. I got very interested in transportation early on. But when I was studying for a profession, that gave me a more scientific understanding of L.A. I used to work for a city council member, Richard Alatorre, and I was hired as a planning deputy. I later worked for the M.T.A. I was hired as an assistant to the project manager that was directing the planning of the Red Line extension into East Los Angeles. Rail transit, the subway — that was the emergence of contemporary L.A.
JP: How so?
DC: L.A. has always been influenced by mobility systems. It's always been the case. In the 1910s and 20s, L.A. had one of the largest trolley systems in the United States. And that system was used to expand the city to make real estate viable for development. And so many of the cities in the county — from Huntington Park, Huntington Beach, Glendale, East Los Angeles, South Los Angeles, Long Beach, you name it — were linked into that trolley system. And over time Southern California became a huge industrial base for the U.S. During World War II, Santa Monica and West Los Angeles had the largest concentrations of engineers and factories that were producing airplanes. Many of the major automobile corporations that existed at that time, from Chevrolet to Ford, had factories in neighboring counties. L.A. has always been a nexus of transportation.
JP: That sense of movement is present in your work, whether it's through people, landscapes or the actual representation of vehicles on the freeway. But I also notice what I might call a beautiful tension. The work moves yet there is a stillness to what we see. A calmness.
DC: I like to think I am facilitating the view. It may be a beautiful painting on a subject that is not always beautiful, but the fact that when you capture that, you see it, you can say, 'Oh my God, I'm seeing more now.' And that's what brings you peace.
JP: 'Iglesia De Dios' gave me that feeling the first time I saw it. I was pulled in by the coloring — the moody, nighttime blues and purples — but also the interplay between light and shadow. What approach do you take when starting out?
DC: This was on Venice Boulevard, which at one time had trolleys. That's why Venice is very wide. I saw the storefront with the name on top — you can see that that church is in a building that was never intended to be a church.
JP: Right.
DC: In L.A. you have a lot of the evangelical elements of religion, which is the signature for immigrants in the city. I thought, the church could be gone in the next two or three years. I was looking at the temporary nature of city buildings. And I integrate that into the art by working with light. Light is a huge element. That's what you see here — the temporary nature of it, but also it's the chemistry of the city.
JP: You have this ability to take something very concrete — a church building, a parking lot, the interior of a restaurant — and infuse it with all sorts of meaning.
DC: Every painting is like a poem. And the reason why I say poetry is because it needs to be read by someone else. I can never finish a painting if I only did it for myself. It's not possible. Memory is also extremely important in art. If we work toward cultivating our ability to remember, then we extend our lives and we extend our legacy into the future.
JP: In a way, your work feels like a natural extension of your career in city government. It's packed with history.
DC: I have always been interested in understanding how humans build cities, and how the cities that they build impact the humans that now live there. Los Angeles was growing when it transitioned from the trolleys to the freeways. That was not necessarily a good thing. Even though it opened up areas for people to go to, the freeways did not create more livable communities. It became about the business of real estate.
JP: It has.
DC: The history of the United States is a history of segregation. It's a history of land use and using that in order to accomplish goals that are not necessarily good for everybody. Transportation doesn't need to be that way. If the planners and the people that work in transportation understand that, then you can use transportation to build a more livable city. You can facilitate accessibility for everybody. That will always be a challenge. Now we have, for example with President Trump, a huge obstacle to trying to understand that the government is not a business. And that the allocation of resources is not about making deals. Public policy is not about playing cards. This experience with President Trump is going to wake people up — in good and bad ways.
JP: I wonder, then, if your work is about reclaiming a kind of real estate?
DC: I'm recording history here. [Cardoso points to a painting hanging on the back wall of his studio.] That was the worst day of the pandemic. The city had suddenly shut down. I painted it that April. The freeways were empty except for the gardeners that were going to work. And you see that tree right there? That's a ficus tree. In Southern California, in the United States of America, nature is also a conjunction of immigrants. Many trees in the United States are not native trees. I include a lot of that in my work. When people talk about preservation, they forget that there are so many things in our nation, in our city, in our neighborhood, that also migrate and they're not human, but they migrated. We have to be humble and aware of that.
Jason Parham is a senior writer at Wired and a documentary producer. He is a frequent contributor to Image.
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