The Ungodly Truth

El Gallo’s FALSE GODS at The Grand Gallery

September 1 – 30, 2026

We walk off a sunny Jack London Square sidewalk through the front door of The Grand Gallery and are immediately embraced by the theater of its new central installation, a Gothic tour by El Gallo. Whatever your mood was on the way in, the exhibit’s four large oil on canvas scenes interrupt it and take over.

For many of us the show’s images of industrial-strength power have a seductive familiarity and strangeness; their definitive craftwork makes them oddly hyper-real while variously invoking the steampunk suffocation of Terry Gilliam and Tom Stoppard’s Brasil; the suspicious irrationality of MC Escher’ Ascending and Descending; or the hallucinatory authority of the Wizard of Oz.

But I’ve always said that terror is the fear of the unknown, and that horror is worse, the fear of the known. The purpose of these works is to survey violence, especially the violence that we perpetrate on ourselves. The works readily trigger the matter-of-fact sociopathic treachery of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and the grim overt documentary of Nazi genocide.

Executed roughly five years apart – from 2011 to 2025 – each of the four paintings vividly contrasts the portrayal of people who use violence as the Solution, and those who are considered to be the Problem. They each anchor a chapter of a narrative across the inhuman deification of power, through its militarization, industrialization, socialization, and final shocking humanization. But despite an implied historical evolution across time, we realize that none of these works are old news: they are all contemporary status reports.

The compositional aesthetics of the four works help to bring them all together with equal currency. The featured colors establish deathliness with bluish grays, and some left-over liveliness in pinks or ambers. Skulls, gas masks, or aliens have a common presence in their antipathy and vacant stares. In the pictured environments, liquid pools – normally the source of life – are near certainly toxic. Backgrounds are environments, unnamed spaces.

Even the frames of the pieces work hard and explicitly: two ornate frames ironically glorify their fantastic scenes with faux permanence; but two modernist frames argue for the realism of their message despite our reluctance to believe.

Putting contrasts on equal footing is a strategic element within the scenes as well. One can’t miss the rigorous horizontal symmetry of each painting, enforcing the idea that even where we think we have options or differences – left versus right –  they are subsumed in a greater sameness. But embedded in that is also El Gallo’s main story, one about the powerful consuming the weaker, with no other regard for the weak, and strictly for the lust of the stronger. The painter amplifies this dynamic in a recurring schema where the upper half of the image is a ravenous creature plundering the helpless in the lower half. As a result, we can see the group of four works as a pantheon of threats; or we can see them as four faces of the same timeless and malevolent force.

Spotting AI in 2020, at the onset of the COVID pandemic, El Gallo’s vigilance raises a question, one perhaps now more rhetorical than profound but far more than a cocktail party icebreaker. Did the isolation and dependency on the internet actually increase, permanently, both the pace and attraction of abdicating our autonomy to automation?

But in 2025, the painter gives us the most humanoid of all the villains. We get skin and eyes, and a full-frontal stare; a portrait; the naïve arrogance of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray.

While that differently dramatizes the convention that El Gallo has created, the paintings finally work in common in a more sinister way. At the midpoint of each, there is a fairly inconspicuous small figure who might be seen as the Dreamer, the mastermind, of the much larger and overwhelming presence in the top and background of each work. It is not difficult to ask, who is that figure today and what should be done about him?

As Walt Kelly has said in his famous comic Pogo, we have seen the enemy, and he is us.

Bill Weber, also known as El Gallo, is an established California-based muralist and painter who has been creating public art and fine art since 1974. His meticulous oil paintings and surrealist visions use classic layering techniques to explore dystopian themes that critique industrialization, government corruption, and a decaying society.