Sam Ganados, Without You Without Them

Sam Ganados, The View From the Afternoon, oil on canvas, 48” x 72” 2025. Photo credit Anny Ayala Ortega

Sam Ganados, Without You Without Them at Mission Spring, Las Vegas

by D.K. Sole

In Without You Without Them, Sam Ganados sets large group paintings among smaller depictions of people seen individually or in pairs. The multiperson pictures give context to these other ones. Everyone is implicitly with one another. They’re at a skate park. The outside world is there, realistic (if the artist told me their figures canonically bought that Arizona Ice Tea in a Seven Eleven around the corner then I could picture it), but it doesn’t impinge too much. The important setting is the curved bowl of concrete where they choose to congregate. The importance of a unified location is reflected in the artist’s consistent palette–a hazy pink-orange-purple juxtaposed with cooler colours–that runs around the room.

The execution of the figures is not always perfect. The proportions are sometimes too large or small in places where distortion doesn’t seem intentional; a knee flattens instead of bending. But more often the absence of realism is a choice: a hand at the right of a large diptych is an orange blot but a face below it is detailed because emotion is important to the whole project. Ganados has thought about what they want you to pay attention to, how they want you to look. Their manipulation of perspective suggests that it’s important for you to see and understand without ambiguity: see how this skater in Scorpion has fallen, her torso goes down, her legs go up so sharply it’s as if she has snapped in half. Those two pieces of information are important, the anatomical reality of a body is secondary. The other skaters around her are unmoved: the drama of her fall leaves them nonchalant. Her suffering receives the benediction of the artist’s pink radiance while they are left in cool neutral tones or muting greens. 

Ganados has said that the picture–and not just this one–is a response to the treatment of women and femme-presenting people at skate parks. That’s how they work: “I think of the concept first, they usually come from an experience I had or a common problem I usually see within the broader community.“ The impression that something is wrong isn’t confined to centralised gestures like Scorpion’s fallen skater. The body of work as a whole is infused with subtler signs that create an atmosphere of uneasiness: two dogs are chasing one another near a “no dogs” sign that has tipped over, for example. In spite of that, I left WithoutYou with an overall impression of positive warmth, thanks to the pinks and oranges, the individual portraits with their air of privacy, people glancing down or away, lost in their thoughts; and places where the amount of detail seemed just exactly right, giving me the feeling that the artist was relishing their own skill and losing themselves in the experience of painting creases in jeans or the three-dimensional mass of a skate–all of it suggested a living narrative.

Sam Ganados, Without You Without Them
Mission Spring, 1120 E. Fremont St., Las Vegas
October 26 - November 16, 2025
Presented by Scrambled Eggs

Posted and published by Wendy Kveck on November 15, 2025