“Decepción,” the title of Luis Gispert’s show at the uptown Mary Boone Gallery, at 745 Fifth Avenue, translates from the Spanish not to its English cognate, but more literally to disillusionment or disappointment. The word applies to the effect of the huge photographs in the show, which depict fantasy landscapes seen through the windshields of luxury vehicles.
The photographs pair interiors of BMWs and Cadillacs strewn with designer logos with images of mountains and meadows, the dreamscapes to which plush S.U.V.’s promise to carry their charges.
Mr. Gispert, born in Jersey City in 1972, now lives in Brooklyn. He has explored his Cuban American background and borrowed totems of hip-hop culture in his past pieces: gold jewelry, boom boxes, big speakers, large chrome wheel rims. In a video piece called “Block Watching,” he depicts a cheerleader mouthing the sound of a car alarm.
In “Decepción,” Mr. Gispert is drawn to vehicles upholstered in logo-patterned fabrics and leather. The constant backbeat of hip-hop’s fixation with luxury is echoed visually in the vehicles, from their step-and-repeat Louis Vuitton LVs to cursive Stephen Sprouse signature patterns.
Mr. Gispert photographed many landscapes before choosing examples collaged into the fantasy lands visible through the vehicles’ windshields. His work explores “a subculture within a subculture” of logo customizers, according to a statement by the gallery.
The car customizers, arguably more enamored of the logos than the companies they signify, are required to find independent sources of materials printed with logos in a repeated, wallpaper-like style. Uptown custom clothing shops like the Dapper Dan store on 125th Street, a hot spot for early rappers noted for producing garments generously sprinkled with Gucci and LV logos, used to be one such source. (It was also the location of a noted altercation in 1988 between heavyweight boxers Mike Tyson and Mitch Green, known as Blood.)
The result is at times difficult to distinguish from the work of Japanese logo obsessives, notably Takashi Murakami, who designed a Louis Vuitton logo. Mr. Gispert’s photos, meanwhile, recall the work of documentarian Alex Harris, who recorded the lovingly customized interiors of low riders on the West Coast and cars in Cuba from the inside out.
How Fiat overlooked Mr. Gispert and his subjects when concocting its 500 by Gucci edition, we can’t imagine.
“Decepción” runs through Oct 22.