In the earlier series, where Mr. Gonzalez-Tornero borrows from artists like Van Gogh, Rembrandt and El Greco, one may sense a meditative or reflective quality to the brush strokes.
The protruding, funnel-shaped headdress and the way Mr. Gonzalez-Tornero depicts the subject's coarse hair, tough skin and woven clothing gives this painting its visual punch.
Second, because of the ways Mr. Gonzalez-Tornero assigns a different pattern or texture to each object, one gets a sense of a Jackson Pollock-like composition where there is little or no distinction between the incidental and the purposeful.
In one of them, Mr. Gonzalez-Tornero uses the postmodernist method of borrowing imagery from well-known paintings.
The pencil lines that remain unpainted along the bottom or top of the canvas after Mr. Gonzalez-Tornero completes the main subject of the painting are sometimes filled in with colors other than red or white.
To this painting, and most of the red and white paintings of the Pacific Northwest series, Mr. Gonzalez-Tornero adds patches of flat color.
For his part, Mr. Gonzalez-Tornero says the work is dedicated to a 19th-century carver of totem poles, Albert Wedard Edenshaw, and he might be trying to pack the inherent power of a totem carving in the aggressive shape.
In "The Grand Inquisitor" portrait, based on the El Greco painting "Portrait of Cardinal Nino de Guevara," Mr. Gonzalez-Tornero adds a conspicuous line that changes its form from solid to dashes to dots as it encircles the subject.
In "The Duchess of Alba," which is based on a Goya painting of the same title, Mr. Gonzalez-Tornero employs a bold system of markings on the subject's arms and face.
In Sergio Gonzales-Tornero's "Sioux Pictograph," white symbols tell a rough story on a bright red ground.
Mr. Gonzales-Tornero's newest series, inspired by the history of Pacific Northwest, is more about the intangible and less about the regally recognizable.
