Adalberto Gonzalez may well be one of the best painters of cars in Northern California. He doesn’t work in the eye-popping sparkle-and-shine mode of Cali low-rider culture, and he only rarely finds himself refinishing an Italian exotic.

Gonzalez, who goes by the nickname Coco, runs the paint room at Alameda Collision Repair, a high-quality shop that fixes slightly more than 13 cars every day, six days a week. Painting a panel, from a simple ding to something much, much worse is the last stop in a car repair, which makes it a bottleneck. What makes Gonzalez so good is that he's fast. He is an artist at uncorking the bottleneck. But unlike most artists, if you can perceive even the faintest hint of his work, he has made a mistake.

Coco Gonzalez is an ace at repainting a car with different colors—so your eye can't tell the difference. Christie Hemm Klok

You’re thinking, big whoop. A car comes in, a 2015 Toyota Camry, let's say, in Ruby Flare Pearl (that’s red) needing a bashed-in door Bondo’d and sanded. You just go to a shelf and take down 2015 Toyota Ruby Flare Pearl, click a canister into an airgun, and swoosh, you’re back on the road, right?

Nope. Car companies have put 50,000 to 60,000 car colors on the road, but even a big body shop like Alameda Collision Repair has just 70 or 80 colors on its shelves. Turns out Gonzalez isn't just a fast painter, he’s a fast matcher. “I get the closest one,” he says, “and then I match the color.”

A rack of possible paints waits to get mixed into a match Christie Hemm Klok At the beginning of the process, a painter tries to match a sprayed-out color on a card to the actual body color. Christie Hemm Klok

Gonzalez is making what's called a metamer, a color indistinguishable from a reference even if its physics and chemistry differ. It's not easy. Automotive colors are increasingly sophisticated and complicated. "Harlequins,” for example, show three different colors depending on what angle you’re looking from; new mattes compete with pearls and metallics. But in a deep, philosophical way, none of that matters, because the physics of how light interacts with a paint is less important than the biology and neuroscience of how the eye and brain turn that physics into an idea of color.

Gonzalez begins by consulting a wall-mounted computer touchscreen for basic recipes that replicate colors from the original equipment manufacturers. A given OEM paint might require a recipe of seven, eight, a dozen paints from an aftermarket company like AkzoNobel1 or PPG. (I should disclose here that my cousin's company supplies paint to Alameda Collision and put me onto Gonzalez.)

But even with a recipe in hand, Gonzalez will have to account for “field variance.” That’s a polite way of saying, how messed up is this car? Has it been parked outside for two years? Was it painted at the beginning of a new run, when the assembly line’s paint system might not have been cleaned properly and still contained a little bit of the last color? Is it “darker and dirtier?” A little redder? A little bluer?

The bright lights of the paint room are supposed to show differences rarely apparent to the naked eye. Christie Hemm Klok

Clad in a plasticized jumpsuit and a Mickey Mouse baseball cap, Gonzalez works in a walk-in-closet-sized room adjacent to the big, ventilated chamber where he paints the parts. The dozens of individual colors are in white plastic containers on paint-spattered shelves that run from floor to ceiling. Gonzalez pulls a plastic container from a dispenser mounted on the wall, sets it on a scale, and starts pouring colors from the shelf—following the basic recipe. His work table is covered in butcher paper stuck down with yellow tape; the floor is a speckled, unintentional Jackson Pollack painting.

When he’s done mixing, the color still won’t be right.

The floor of a paint shop can become spontaneously self-generating art—that might look a little familiar. Christie Hemm Klok

After assembly, cars go through an elaborate automated and industrialized paint process. The so-called "body in white"—the steel-and-aluminum-and-sometimes-plastic-and-carbon-fiber completed car—gets a phosphate dip to clean it and then a bath in an e-coat tank, short for electrophoretic coating, where the resulting electric charge makes a grey-green sludge stick to the car in a thin, homogenous layer. That becomes the surface to which everything else—the colors—will stick.

“After the e-coat we start applying the things that in a body repair shop we’d be trying to mimic the color of,” says Mike Henry, a longtime color expert at PPG, the biggest paint and coatings company in the world. He’s been there for 35 years, but unlike most of the people in his world of color, he isn’t a chemist—Henry got his MFA in studio painting from Miami University.





1 / 10 Chevron Chevron Christie Hemm Klok

The next coats are primers, or primers and paints. Chemistries vary, but all paints are essentially a combination of pigment, which reflects and absorbs light to give a specific color; solvent, which carries the pigment onto a surface; and binder, which keeps the pigment mixed. The pigment might also include ingredients like silica that make metallic or pearlescent flakes look finer or coarser. Those kind of effects make a paint “goniochromatic”—meaning the finish looks different from different angles. (Gonio is Greek for "angle.")