As Hockney’s cool pool dive goes for £23m, we meet Ramiro Gomez, the Mexican-American putting labourers, security guards, removal men and more back into the picture

David Hockney’s “splash” paintings are still making waves. A medium-sized canvas from the 1967 series, showing the aftermath of a dive into the clear blue waters of a California pool, just sold at auction for £23m. In the half-century since it was painted, the work has become synonymous with a languid LA lifestyle, from the glass-fronted house beyond the pool to the two perfect palm trees reaching into a sky empty of everything but blue. This is a secluded bolthole, an oasis from the world of noise, a place to drink and dive.

Yet what might the picture look like if its focus was altered, away from the entry into the pool made by that swimmer whose identity Hockney never knew (having based the picture on a photograph)? What if the attention was instead shifted towards the less fortunate guys who have to service the waters and make sure they’re clean enough for rich people to plunge into?

You can see the answer in Ramiro Gomez’s painting No Splash, in which the 33-year-old artist imagines the underclass working behind this world-famous scene: the splash has gone and instead there are two men of colour on the far side, tending to the pool and its surroundings. “Hockney decided to focus on a two-second splash,” says Gomez, “whereas I was questioning the pool cleaners’ temporary nature.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shifting focus … in Movers, El Tovar Place, West Hollywood, two cutouts appear to be shifting a sofa towards a real removals truck. Photograph: courtesy of the artist/Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles

Gomez first came across Hockney’s work at school, though he only truly understood the clean lines of the mid-century houses and the tropical tints of the pools in the British artist’s southern Californian paintings when he took a nannying job, and found himself living and working in such an environment.

The artist was born in California, the son of undocumented immigrants. “I come from a big Mexican-American community in San Bernardino, about an hour east of Los Angeles. I helped raise my younger cousins and Latin American culture emphasises child-rearing, so a childcare job was perfect.”

The opening came via Gomez’s then boyfriend and now husband, David Feldman, a film editor. In 2009, due to academic and financial pressures, Gomez dropped out of the fine arts programme at the California Institute of the Arts. At the same time, one of Feldman’s colleagues – a fellow editor living in Laurel Canyon – needed a nanny.

Gomez took the live-in role, spending the next two and a half years in and among the households on LA’s affluent West Side. “I felt like I was part of the family, because they knew my boyfriend,” Gomez says. “But at the same time, I got to know the housekeepers, the handymen, the gardener. Those people reminded me of my relatives back home.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest LA landmark … a security guard outside the hot-pink Paul Smith store. Photograph: courtesy of the artist/PPOW, New York

Caught between these two worlds, Gomez would retire to his room at the end of the working day, and leaf through Architectural Digest and other interiors magazines belonging to the woman of the house, a designer. “I looked at the houses pictured,” he says, “and compared them with the one I was working in.” The photographs were beautiful, but domestic labourers were nowhere to be seen.

Gomez began to tear pages out, inking and later painting in the missing people, to create the first works in his ongoing Magazine series. He creates these paintings more as questions than as heavy, social statements, using the words “subtle anger” to explain his motivation. “I try to stay away from didactic work,” he says. “I leave that to the activists. I’m trying to find the middle ground.”

Later, he moved on to Hockney, with whom he feels a certain kinship. “We’re both gay males and see LA as outsiders in some way.” Gomez broadened his scope to take in LA landmarks, painting the Broad art museum with a rubbish collector and placing a security guard outside the hot pink Paul Smith store. Gomez and Feldman have also collaborated, with Feldman shooting photos of some of Gomez’s cardboard cutouts in locations around LA. In one – called Movers, El Tovar Place, West Hollywood – two men are shifting a sofa towards a real removals truck.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Working as a nanny, I got to know the housekeepers, the handymen, the gardeners’ … Ramiro Gomez. Photograph: Astrid Riecken/Washington Post/Getty Images

Gomez has now moved on from Hockney. “I don’t want to make a career out of [remaking] his paintings,” he explains. Now he’ll occasionally cast his references further back: he recreated, in a cardboard cutout, the Infanta Margaret Theresa from Velásquez’s 17th-century masterpiece Las Meninas, but had her attended not by Spanish ladies-in-waiting, but by Mexican-American domestic workers. To drive the point home, Gomez installed the work, street-art style, in and around the driveways of Bel Air. “There are so many new princesses,” he says, “so many new courtly homes.”

Many of those homeowners are now collecting Gomez’s paintings. He quit the nannying job six years ago and is now represented by the commercial yet politically engaged New York gallery PPOW, which is just about to show his work in their booth at the city’s ADAA art fair. Gomez is now coming to terms with “fulfilling a role that affluent people demand. It’s a really hard thing to navigate.”

The show will feature a collection of his Magazine pieces, hung salon style, but he is also planning to drop by several days earlier, to capture the labourers working on the fair. “I’ll produce cardboard cutouts of stuff I see, such as art handlers or the people building the booth wall,” he says. “Maybe even janitors passing by, looking at my work.”

LA, after all, is not the only place where labourers are erased from the picture. “This happens in Pakistan, Hong Kong, London, Latin America, you name it,” he says. “I feel the need to say that these people are not disposable.”

• Ramiro Gomez is at ADAA: The Art Show, New York, 27 February to 1 March.