ABOUT
Painting, a noble activity to which Kristopher Raos devotes himself honorably. A first impression of the work, with their uncanny familiarity recognized in fields of color and dynamic compositions, is the sense of joy and pride, ones that exude from their maker. Kristopher, a clairvoyant of the overlooked and discarded, visually reproduces and composes his subject material – an array of logos, street signage, bits of commercial iconography, and other cultural and urban detritus – with illusionist finesse. Working in large and small-scale paintings, sculptures, and drawings in an expansive range of moods, the work suggests a sense of nostalgia for the objects and encounters as related to his own experiences and also modes of mass production and consumption.
The handmade shape canvases, precision brushwork, attention to details and flawless execution reflect Kristopher’s position on art and corporeality. Working with minimalist simplicity of form, shape and color, Kristopher keeps safe distances from figurative, representational and abstraction, preferring to the poetic and the bricolage. Here, painting’s mimetic capability is resisted and the mode of ‘reproduction’ unfaithful, the work depicts ‘snatches of everyday life’ but are diverted and abbreviated. These hard surfaces of our discordant and image-saturated reality are pacified; doubts, not angst, are hymned in inventions and allure. The painting’s presence is “located” in a space, though not painted, shaped by spectatorial tensions provoked. Kristopher painterly makes visible this disappearing act.
Kristopher Raos (b. 1987 in Bakersfield, California) is based in Los Angeles, CA transitioned from graffiti to his studio fine art practice in 2011. Kristopher taught himself to paint professionally and adopted the hardedge and modernist abstract aesthetics whose work is of a particular contemporaneity. Growing up between Bakersfield, California and Mexico City, Mexico, his early domestic life offered much inspirations and solitude for his assertion of painterly ambitions and material collecting. Continuing the pictorial strategies of Westcoast painters, his paintings hover between concrete poetry and abstraction. Kristopher Raos’s work has been featured at galleries including as-is Gallery, MaRS Gallery, Chris Sharp Gallery, The Hole, Torrance Art Museum, Benton Museum of Art, Pomona and Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, F2T Gallery in Milan, Italy, Baik Art in Seoul, South Korea, Harper’s Gallery,Los Angeles, Massey Klien Gallery and Venus Over Manhattan in New York, NY.