Charlie James Gallery is proud to present Elmer Guevara: Yesterday like today / Ayer cómo hoy, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. In this new body of work, Guevara explores ideas of intergenerational memory and trauma, reflecting on his own family’s experience of civil war and unrest across time and space. The paintings meditate on the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising, which tore through South Central near where the Guevara family settled after fleeing violence in El Salvador. Time folds in on itself in these paintings, layering the civil war, which predated the artist’s birth, on top of the chaotic experiences of 1992, while also gesturing to the natural disasters and political unrest of the present moment. Despite his heavy subjects, Guevara never loses sight of the personal stories of regular people working to make a life in tumultuous times.

Mural-sized painting The Get Down is Guevara’s largest to date, stretching to nearly 14 feet. It depicts an amalgamation of scenes from the 1992 events, including not only a tussle between the central five men with looting and burning in the background, but also children playing and witnessing the event. The figures are rendered nearly life-sized, creating a bodily experience that places the viewer in the midst of the action. Guevarra relishes the very distinct fashion and color palette of the 1990s – jerseys of popular sports stars find their way onto several figures, and bright, primary colors add a popping visual energy to the chaotic scenes. Here, the chaos is aided by supernatural forces: skeletons pour gasoline on the fire and call for backup, black cats dot the landscape, and an ominous oarfish snakes across the ground. These elements underscore an interest in the power we give to symbols and the ways in which lives can change in an instant.

The exhibition’s cast of characters is largely made up of the artist’s family and friends. His brother joins the looters in Our Come Up, and Updates and Relief finds the artist’s mother studying a newspaper spread across her kitchen table whose splashy headlines tell of chaos and crackdown amid the 1992 (Detail) Elmer Guevara “Playing With Fire” Oil on linen, 60 x 72 inches, 2025 uprising. Guevara sources archival print stories to create the newspapers in his paintings, stitching and collaging them together to create an imagined paper that enters the canvas through a phototransfer process. He uses this same process to infuse figures with ghostly hints of past traumas: images of war and rioting that are carried in the body like tattoos on skin. And yet many of the paintings here emphasize the resilience of continuing daily life – children playing, the work of family and care continuing – amidst the unrest on the doorstep.

Guevara often riffs on art historical precedent, posing his contemporary figures as Renaissance nobles and saints. The large self-portrait Couple Hours after 3:15pm mirrors the figure of the 17th-century painting Portrait of a Man with a Sheet of Music from the Getty Museum collection. The classical setting has been swapped for a Los Angeles sidewalk, where the figure sits holding a newspaper announcing the beating of Rodney King. The scene appears placid at first, but the violent headline is echoed in the painting’s title – referencing the time at which the officers’ acquittal was announced – and the flames that erupt in the far distance. The contrast between the sunny California scene and the eminent violence glimpsed behind builds a tension that plays out across the exhibition.

The particular quality of California light is important to understanding Guevara’s works. His interest in California color bloomed while in art school in New York as a way to counteract that city’s prevailing grey and brick palette. His study of Bay Area painters such as Wayne Thiebaud and Elmer Bischoff comes through in his use of rich, saturated color that brings a sense of playful light to areas of both sun and shadow. The rooftop landscape Ghetto Bird View brings this sensibility to South Central. A portrait of both the family home and a major site of looting in 1992, this work combines the light’s particular beauty and the ever-present reminder of unrest. In this remixing of family history and personal experience, Guevara processes the impact of political unrest on his own life and his wider community, both strengthening his connection to the past and grounding himself in the very present.