Joe Roberts, Oracle Dream Rot, Guerrero Gallery, Los Angeles
Joe Roberts, Dreamweaver, 2025, Oil and Acrylic on Panel, 18 x 24 in.
This review is part of our “Artist on Artist” series.
Chad Abbley is a working artist living in San Francisco.
By Chad Abbley
The interior of the gallery sets the stage: well-lit white surfaces, a shallow slanted ceiling, floors painted white, and an arrangement of small-to-medium paintings adorning the space. No sculptures, no multimedia, no apparent modification to the gallery space itself, just pigments on panels and canvas, allowing the work to control the entire narrative.
Oracle Dream Rot is Joe Roberts’s third solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based Guerrero Gallery, running from November 15 through December 20, 2025. The show centers on "hallucinatory visions" and "social and moral decay." The paintings deliver that, coated in highly saturated mixes of paint.
Joe Roberts, 2025, Deer, Oil on Canvas, 11 x 14 in. courtesy: Guerrero Gallery, Los Angeles
The first thing you notice is how toothy the surfaces are. Roberts’s brushwork and use of pumice medium in the paint give the paintings a gritty dimension. Landscape 3 and Landscape 4 look as if they might be quintessential moody forest scenes, but look closer and you’ll see the colors decoupling: electric yellow highlights, varying orange shadows, a pale blue river, and blotches of cool sky piercing the trees occupying the foreground. The trees feel as though they are vibrating off the surface. In Deer, a sweet little Bambi walks through the forest, except its ribcage is a grid of loosely rendered alien heads. Cute until it isn't.
Joe Roberts, 2025, Warp Whistle, Oil and Acrylic on Panel, 13 x 21 in. courtesy: Guerrero Gallery, Los Angeles
Then comes the interior still-lifes. Warp Whistle (on scrap wood) a crockpot, Pyrex cup, and a jar of Mimosa Hostillis root bark (DMT starter kit) next to a tiny Snoopy, asleep on his doghouse, blowing a little music note bubble. The night time scene is being illuminated by small square windows on a series of buildings seen on the right side through a window perspective. Dreamweaver keeps the nighttime setting but adds a purple Mickey Mouse holding a machine gun, perched on a container labeled "Danger Acid", which is arranged on a table as though it were normal houseware. Familiar objects sharing space with toxic chemicals, cartoon characters, and weapons creates a ridiculous tension; a stark highlighting of human mortality.
(L) Joe Roberts, Lorax, 2025, Oil and Acrylic on Panel, 28 x 22 in.
(M) Joe Roberts, 2025, Reflecting Pool, Oil and Acrylic on Panel, 48 x 36 in. courtesy: Guerrero Gallery, Los Angeles
(R) Joe Roberts, 2025, Hollow Chains, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas, 20 x 16 in. courtesy: Guerrero Gallery, Los Angeles
The larger panels turn the dial to eleven. Lorax places an emphasis on symmetry. Mirrored imagery on the left and right allows the eyes to dance back and forth in rhythm. Hollow Chains repeats a grouping of aesthetically similar jester aliens until the pattern begins to crawl. New Ark takes the journey to another altitude—A basketball with Bugs Bunny on it, specifically from the movie Space Jam (1996), Nike Air More Uptempo shoes, a samurai sword, tiny orca whales in a fish tank and a phonograph, all floating in a spacecraft set amongst a blue star field. River Lethe Crossing and Reflecting Pool are 36 x 48 inches of horizontal ramps, archways, moats, and doorways that seem to never resolve: painted in the most saturated colors within the entire show. You could get lost in the sauce.
The through-line is nostalgia weaponized. Pop-culture examples like Pikachu, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Snoopy get dragged into a scene that is quietly unsettling. The inviting color palette makes it feel inevitable instead of tragic. It's funny, then uneasy, then funny again.
Guerrero hung the work with ample breathing room. The paintings are spaced like separate chapters in a story, which make the colors louder in contrast to the stark whiteness of the exposed walls and floor.
Roberts keeps everything locked inside the canvas — no sound, no lights, no tricks, just paint and a little bit of texture to accent the work. The whole show feels like it’s dying to explode past the edges but it never does.
Joe Roberts, 2025, Custer, Oil on Canvas, 10 x 8 in. courtesy: Guerrero Gallery, Los Angeles
Custer is a small 10 × 8 inch canvas: a soldier in a blue uniform is lying in the dirt, riddled with arrows, a pistol just out of reach, blood pooling under the corpse. After all that Snoopy-DMT chaos, that tiny painting feels like someone turned the music off. Colonialism, ego death, bad trip—pick one, I’m not sure.
Oracle Dream Rot is that rare painting show that actually feels like a trip: rough when it needs to be, colors loud but never screaming, and the jokes got teeth. Up till December 20. If you can get there, get there.
