Flowerbomb Gil Gonzalez Published by Elk (2009) 49 Pages, 15 x 21 cm, Softcove, Colour and Black and White Gil Gonzalez was born in Iquitos, Peru sometime in the late 1960s and grew up between Lima and Miami before settling in Boca Raton as a teenager. All evidence points to his artistic endeavors beginning in this period, where he reportedly honed his style while working as a busboy at Cafe Bellino. Records show that he graduated from Pope John Paul II High School in 1987, but after that the arc of Gonzalez' life is more a matter of conjecture than fact. He seems to have made his way to Southern California, supporting himself by working in restaurants and for the G T swimming pool cleaning firm in Hawthorne. The proximity of Hawthorne to South Gate might have fueled the persistent rumors that Gonzalez is the brother of skateboarder and artist Mark Gonzales, though their surnames are spelled differently and Gonzales stridently denies the connection. Sometime in the mid-1990s Gonzalez was institutionalized for several weeks at the Valley Convalescent Center in El Centro, but the trail goes cold after that, and in fact he was completely unknown until these works were found in a Tecate twelve-pack box next to a shed by an empty swimming pool in Torrance in 2007. Gonzalez' varied, twisted and scatological output does not have an close analogy in contemporary art, outsider or otherwise, and his inscrutable and id-gone awry world of shit, skulls, dogs and cats, the mysterious "Daisey Devillanese," self-destructive elephants, "Honkey Nutz", and $3 incontinence-inducing soybean bean burgers exists in a realm totally of his own making, a profane yet unexpectedly touching extra-dimensional universe. Discovered by pure chance, this effervescence of an exceptional artist's unconscious mind is being unleashed upon a public possibly unprepared but also maybe unknowingly receptive to his one-of-a-kind achievement.