Story by cristina greco / Photography by Ben Welland


I met Trevor Laalo three springs ago, at a grocery store where he was working. He could not contain his excitement while describing the outdoor billboard he and his “group” had transformed into an artwork the night before. I envisioned the billboard with a graffiti tag or perhaps with a female model sporting a spray painted moustache. Not so, not so. The daring project in question required four separate visits and eight hours to complete. It also resulted in a long, arduous police chase. I won't go into detail on the chase, but if you ask Laalo about it he'll probably tell you more than you bargained for.

That's the thing about Laalo, he gives it flat out. But not because he's being nice; for him it's a matter of survival.

In Laalo's presence you quickly learn that he is an animated and compelling storyteller. Before gravitating to visual art, he started out as a writer, poet, spoken word artist, and musician. His stories, like his canvasses, are often chaotic and wide open to interpretation, but use of text is a staple in whatever he does.

Laalo says he “writes on paintings” and “paints on writings.” In both cases, he uses text like colour.

“If I use red on a painting, 100 people will see 100 different reds. Words work the same way, and it's all relative.”

You can “read” Laalo's pieces time and again and what you take away from the experience will vary depending on where you're at in your life.

The works, like the artist, are big and bold. Massive and colourful canvasses stretch out across floors and walls, challenging the viewer to find a place to start or stop. Laalo calls his work “life size,” and wants to invite people in.

“I'm a big guy! I need a big canvas! I need a big space! I believe my paintings give you that idea of the physicality,” says Laalo.

But size is by no means the only thing that matters: “My job as the big artist is to make it big enough to make it inclusionary, so that I'm no longer the big guy and I'm just the artist,” Laalo explains. “I'm not so big anymore... I get smaller and I get smaller and I get smaller...”

Laalo calls himself a humanist and creates on the premise that 99% of our lives are exactly the same.

“We get up, we shit, we eat, we fall in love, get married, we die. Yet despite that, all we want to talk about is our differences.”

Laalo is much more interested in the commonalities.

“I've had plumbers and jugglers and street people come up to me after a show and say that it was the first time in their lives that they actually understood what they were seeing,” said Laalo. “Are you going to sit around and make art for your contemporaries, or are you going to make art that everyone can understand?”

Early in his visual art career, Laalo knew that he was on the right track when a group of children stopped to look at his work. They laughed. They pointed. They got it. This to him meant that he could relate to people on a level that was human rather than self-serving or solely intellectual.







TALKIN' THE TALK
As big as he is, and as loud and arrogant as he might seem, Laalo admits that he deals with insecurities with self-aggrandizing talk in the way that prizefighter Muhammad Ali jawed at anyone who would listen before a big fight.

Only intense self-hype gives Laalo the courage to tear himself apart and spew it onto a canvass.

“The hardest part of doing work you've never seen before is giving yourself permission to do it,” he explains.

When he began his current series of large-format canvasses, Laalo had just completed a show entitled “Confessions of a Box Man: How to Survive When Things Break.” His life was in complete disarray and he realized that he could either go fully insane or choose another way to cope.

“You break back and make your insanity and motivations your own,” Laalo said. “This was the best way I knew how to do that. What I'm going through is no different than what anyone goes through. This is my way of not going through it alone.”

“You have to believe that this is the best way,” he continues, “because this way includes everybody... you can go and run 10 miles a day with your music, but as an artist when you choose to take something and put it on a wall, you're doing more than most. You're laying yourself on the slab and you're saying 'I'm trying to do something'.”

Although Trevor seems as close to anti-academic as anyone I've met, he is well read, skilled in the art of philosophical argument, and knowledgeable about art and art history. In particular he is fond of Albert Camus, the great French writer and thinker.

“Camus was a novelist and an absurdist,” Laalo explains. “It's not existentialism. We are bombarded with a series of events starting with Event One that makes no fucking sense to us. We are constantly thrown into absurd situations, continually, everyday, for the rest of our lives. How do we deal with it? Do you ignore it? Or do you take pictures of it ... do you take snapshots out of your mind and put it out there and say yeah, we are all going through this together.”







NOWHERE LEFT TO RUN
When Laalo went to Venice Beach, California—the subject of two of his recent pieces—he says he “felt at home for the first time.”
It's not difficult to see why. When I visited Venice Beach last summer, I could clearly picture him amid the waifs, strays, artists and vagabonds.

“Everyone who runs eventually hits Venice Beach and then there's nowhere left to run to,” he said to me one night.

During a stay there in 2005, he met a group of artists at a party and they all decided to “do art” right then and there. Laalo slapped a bunch of canvasses on a wall and began working on them all at once. Later, he “quilted” the canvases together, a technique he often uses in his own work.

The group called itself the L.A. Quilting Society, 2005; there are four active members worldwide.

This kind of declarative action supports Trevor's theory that “art is a thing.” He feels that the problem with most artists today is that they're lazy, preferring art to be a theory or concept, not a physical act.

Making art, for Laalo, is a way of being, rather than a title or claim to fame. Art is present in the way he moves, the way he relates, the way he speaks. He is art; constantly evolving, and advancing, striving to be, and to include.

When asked about his current body of work, the artist replied with the question:

“Have you ever read James Joyce's Ulysses? It's one day in one guy's head, one day in one guy's head, that's all Ulysses is.”

Then he draws a parallel between the novel and his canvasses.

“You can look at this and it's like a snapshot of my mind, of any of our minds, at any given moment ... we've got histories, we've got pasts, we've got presents ...”

But art for Laalo is more than a way of organizing the chaos that is life—it's a way of surviving.

What would he do if he didn't make art?

“I'd die.”