Art That’s Never Done : O.C. exhibit: ‘Gronk’ says he doesn’t tend to do a finished piece. Movement, metamorphosis and progression make up his style.

When the artist known only as “Gronk” took part in his first major museum show at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, he painted the figure of a tormented female onto a wall. By the time the exhibit ended, the lady had vanished.

Each day, Gronk had reentered the museum to redo sections of his installation. “Tormenta,” a reoccurring character in much of his work, started off near an exit. And the mysterious woman (who never appears facing front) kept edging farther and farther away.

“Eventually, she walked out the back door, dropping her cigarette, so she could continue on her voyage to more shows, different exhibits,” says Gronk, who now has painted all 12 walls of the Laguna Art Museum’s annex at South Coast Plaza for “Hotel Zombie,” running today through Dec. 31.

Paintings that evolve over time are what Gronk does. Movement, metamorphosis and progression are key to the Los Angeles artist, who sees himself as a performance artist, as well as a maker of highly textured, colorful, one-dimensional works.

“The excitement for me is the process, having reoccurring images,” he said during a lecture Thursday at the Laguna museum’s main site. “I don’t tend to do a finished piece. I want them to be open-ended, like a big sketch pad.”

Growing up in the barrio, the 35-year-old Gronk (whose name in Brazilian dialect means “to fly”; his full name is Glugio Gronk Nicandro) started out on the move, not stationed in front of a canvas.

Shortly after high school, he co-founded “Asco” a 1970s performance collective based in East Los Angeles, whose young, rebellious members taped people to walls for “instant murals,” or staged dinner parties in the middle of the street around traffic islands.

Their work was standard conceptual-performance fodder of the time. But Gronk and friends pushed the edge of the envelope late one night in 1972 after, Gronk says, they had been told by the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that Latinos had no place inside the institution.

“So we spray-canned all the exits and entrances, claiming the museum as our piece,” he recalls.

Seventeen years later, Gronk broke through the racial boundary: He was featured in “Hispanic Art in the United States, 30 Contemporary Painters and Sculptors,” a major traveling show that made a stop at LACMA.

His approach still hasn’t changed much. A sense of continuation and process is evident in “Hotel Zombie,” the latest installment of his “Grand Hotel Series.”

Begun in the early 1980s, the series took its inspiration from a previous series Gronk did, based on the ill-fated Titanic cruise ship--”the biggest thing that man had ever made at the time”--which led him to want to further explore “a sense of something big, made by man in a grand fashion.”

Still working on the series hours before he was to have finished it, covering the annex walls with thick black brush strokes and filling its rooms with a sense of urgency and movement, Gronk said it was still too early to tell “what it is all about,” but he gave some clues as to its meaning.

“I like the word zombie to begin with and zombie can also be a cocktail,” he said. A darker side evident in his series (some paintings depict hell, oppression and human decadence) emerged as he spoke enigmatically of zombies employed in Haiti that constitute “a cheap labor force,” cheap “because you don’t have to pay them, they’re dead.”

“Tormenta” probably will not check into “Hotel Zombie,” Gronk said. But just as she travels from one painting to another, ideas and images generated by this project are likely to show up elsewhere.

“I like to have the paint dictate to me what’s happening. It’s like playing jazz: You just let yourself go. What feels right, you keep. And hopefully at the end, I’ll be able to step back and take information from this for future projects.”

“Hotel Zombie,” an installation by Gronk, remains at the Laguna Art Museum satellite site, South Coast Plaza, 3333 Bristol St., Costa Mesa, through Dec. 31. Hours: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Fridays; 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays., 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. Admission: free. Information: (714) 662-3366 or (714) 494-8971.