Luis Ocon is 71 by now. He mostly just comes in and spins the machines, and tinkers around sometimes. But back in the ’60s in Mexico City, he was setting slugs with the best of ‘em. Then, the California-dreaming linotype operator made his way to the USA and pressed on to Hollywood, where he got a job at the Aardvark Letterpress.
“With a little bit of patience, and a whole lot of imagination, anything is possible,” is the motto he coined — one that the vintage printer on Seventh Street across from MacArthur Park still embraces today.
Luis worked his way up the ladder at Aardvark and bought the business in 1978. In 1980, he bought a 100-year-old Chandler & Price hand-operated printing press, and Aardvark Letterpress moved on from typography to become one of the best-known letterpress printers by 1982.
The Aardvark Press is a remnant from a bygone era: the letterpress-printing era. It’s still operating at a level of mastery that you rarely see in a world of soulless computer-generated business cards and e-vites. There’s a weight and density to what Aardvark produces. It’s tactile ... texturous. You can feel the quality of the work. It makes an impression on the paper, and the paper makes an impression on every hand that touches it.
The old Chandler & Price hand-operated press is still in operation, as well as two Heidelberg windmill presses and a Miehle V-50 vertical press. The clientele is diverse, ranging from top designers to studios, museums, artists and, of course, movie stars.
The future didn’t always look so bright for these craftsmen. Luis’ son Brooks remembers a dark hour in the ’80s, after computer design’s abrupt intrusion into the printing world. “Business and the age-old process of setting hard type was being pushed out by cheap, instant computer typesetting,” he says. But the family business operated by Brooks and his mother and father persevered. Brooks’ brother Cary came back into the fold around that time.
“My brother was actually a lawyer,” Brooks confides as if he’s disclosing a dirty secret. “He was one of those frustrated lawyers. He hated it. He was having nightmares. He came back to help his ol’ brother.” Together they’ve transformed the traditional industrial print shop into a custom studio.
“Debra Messing ... a lot of people who aren’t famous, like Steve Tish, those billionaire types,” Brooks struggles to name their celebrity clients. “I can never think of them when you ask ... um ... Bruce Willis. My brother just took a bunch of movie-star pictures off the wall the other day.”
Aardvark is a sanctuary; walking through the doors is time travel from another dimension where, like the machinery here, life is considerably less complicated and the end product is quality and value.
The shop prints for a lot of artists. Brooks and company have assembled an impressive group of L.A.’s best to launch their fine-art department’s first project: “Los Angeles Loteria,”featuring 18 L.A. artists. You can see some of the work now at the Tobey C. Moss Gallery (7321 Beverly Blvd., www.tobeycmossgallery.com).
Of course, like everything else they do at Aardvark... it’s worth looking at.
2500 W. Seventh St., L.A., (213) 388-2271 or www.aardvarkletterpress.com.
With 17 of the 18 prints, each plate represents one color in solid blocks with no overlap. In the four-color process, colors are overlayed to produce a wide spectrum of color through mixing. For a complex artwork with multiple tones like Ed’s, we determined, along with advice from Claudia Laub (another of our artists and legendary letterpress goddess) that four-color was the way to go.
The most critical part of the operation is the adjustment of the colors while on the press. 
Like all the others, this print was beautifully achieved on the Vandercook 4 Letterpress.
Even though in an edition of one-hundred, there is more variation in each of these prints than in those accomplished in the usual manner revealing the hand and fine art not just of Ed Wexler who supervised his print run but also of master pressman Bill Berkuta.
Bill also teaches classes at The International Printing Museum in
We highly recommend that you make time to see this show. It runs through August 30th and includes amazing works that are reasonably priced by many artists including Carlos Almaraz, Francisco Toledo, Raul Anguiano, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Leonora Carrington , Carlos Merida, Rufino Tamayo, Gronk and our three artists; Daniel Gonzalez, Dave Lefner, Ernesto Yerena
Tobey C. Moss Gallery •
Bryan from Classic Rentals
Erick understood that the most important thing was the proper display of the art. Letterpress printing has subtle dimensionality that is both tactile and pleasing to the eye. Its physicality and depth is the thing that sets it apart from other forms of printing. Once framed, it needs to be properly lit in order to take advantage of these qualities. We also wanted to have the party at Aardvark so that guests could have a firsthand look at the process of letterpress as both art and performance.
From the very start Erick saw clearly how all of this could be accomplished. Our space isn’t large and we needed to be able to accommodate at least 600 people. To that end, he planned an outdoor tent beside Aardvark in which to premiere our first 18 Loteria Cards. The genius of his idea was that the art could be viewed from both inside and outside of our shop and made it feel as though the business had doubled its square footage.
The specialty fabric of the tent wall and the elegant lighting inside and out made the framed prints come alive and made our vintage printing presses even more glamorous. His plan also maximized the people-flow.
Guests could enter the business, walk through the length of it, out the back door into the tent to view the art, arriving back at the beginning beside Aardvark’s entrance. The flow could go in either direction.
Cary Ocon and Joan Marshall
No one in
All photos: Lisa Jane Persky
El Rio
