Can I Live
Charlie James Gallery, March 8, 2025 - April 5, 2025
CJG is pleased to present Can I Live, a solo exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles artist Kristopher Raos, his third with the gallery. Raos invites the world into the space of painting, using his unparalleled eye for the aesthetic possibilities of the city’s neglected corners and discarded debris to elevate the quotidian to a higher realm. His crisp lines, sharp colors, and chic abstractions only seem detached; their cool exterior hides a deeply personal body of work whose razor-sharp humor playfully comments on class, struggle, and the hustle necessary to make it in a world that often feels made to keep you down.
The exhibition takes its title from a track off of Jay-Z’s 1996 debut album, in which the rapper alludes to the mental toll of the hustle and a foundational desire to rise out of poverty. Raos brings his own experience of scarcity to this body of work. The key to the exhibition lies in its smallest painting: the diminutive canvas of Untitled (Product of Poverty) sits snug within an appropriated cardboard box that once held a block of so-called government cheese, that highly processed product distributed for free to low-income households since the Reagan administration. Raos, himself a product of the Reagan ‘80s, has debossed his own birthday into the soft cheese-orange canvas in the style of On Kawara, stamping his own identity into the annals of art history and reclaiming what was once a source of shame.
Raos brings to his work a deep knowledge of and admiration for his art historical precedents. The vibrant bands of color in Untitled (Outchea getting bread, if you wonder where i’ve been) read like Ellsworth Kelly’s iconic Red, Yellow, Blue paintings turned ninety degrees. But the work also refers to the Wonder Bread factory outlet, whose discounted near-expired foods were a staple of the artist’s childhood. Untitled (Never had the tools), meanwhile, takes its subject and altar-like shape from John Baldessari’s 1988 Banquet, calling into stark contrast the states of plenty and lack on display. Raos gives himself a seat at the table, though, his name playing like alphabet soup across the oval bowl of the spoon.
Mingling high and low referents has become a signature for Raos, whose elegant lines often conceal collected bits of the gently decrepit Los Angeles he inhabits. His eye is attuned to the comic potential of the city’s palimpsest, finding aesthetic value in juxtapositions and refuse. Untitled (Space Kraft, Miracle Whip) recreates a fractured plastic jar lid picked up off the street. Its shaped canvas carefully reproduces the sheared edges of its referent, transforming a beat-up found object into a vehicle for precision and perfection. The elevated, vibrant blue retains roots in the scratched-up Kraft plastic, the same scratched blue of the plastic chairs that filled the waiting rooms of government assistance offices. The color palette of midcentury idealism, filtered through high-art minimalism on one hand and the aesthetics of administration on the other, reconverge in Raos’s confident hand.
Raos pushes his use of shaped canvas and embossed detail to new heights in Untitled (Out of options). The painting takes its shape and color from the iconic Le Creuset frying pan, its raised rounded edge painstakingly recreated in layer after layer of built-up paint. The French brand is a luxury in any kitchen, and that the model for this work came from the artist’s own is a symbol of how far he’s come since his childhood, when it wouldn’t be unusual to find someone cooking drugs in the family kitchen. Raos found escape in art, and inspiration everywhere: from the aspirational bravado of 90s rap to the bright, flat colors of signage and commercial packaging to bits of trash fished off the streets. Techniques honed over years of self-taught practice have coalesced into a robust and singular vernacular confident enough to plumb this very personal material with polished élan.
Painter / Piloto: (Slow and steady wins the race)
Charlie James Gallery, Nov 4, 2023-December 16,2023
“The Driver and the Race” by Nicolas Ezequiel Orozco-Valdivia
Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Painter/Piloto (Slow and steady wins the race) featuring new work by Los Angeles artist Kristopher Raos. Drawing inspiration from images of vintage car racing, Raos keys into the graphic possibilities of the sport’s abundant trackside banners and transforms these small moments into crisp, vibrant hard edge paintings. These works stop you in your tracks with clean lines and subtle embossed details, while at the same time giving a feeling of great velocity. All oriented as landscapes, the close cropped images have the sense of something glimpsed while zooming past at high speed, placing the viewer in the driver’s seat of this stunning exhibition.
Raos brings Ellsworth Kelly to the racetrack in the exhibition’s centerpiece, Untitled (Shell be coming around). The trapezoidal canvas stretches across the wall as if distorted by speed, a joyfully saturated color field painting crashing into the sidewall of corporate sponsorship. Raos’s paintings only seem fast, however: each color’s rich density is realized through countless layers of paint, each hard edge painstakingly achieved by hand and eye alone. This is doubly true for Raos’s signature embossed passages, which must be built up slowly and meticulously to succeed. Here, these passages also often playfully question the gravitas of professional motorsport by introducing the iconography of local Los Angeles gas stations, tire shops, and brands into the compositional field.
The visual landscape of Los Angeles is central to Raos’s project and always makes itself known in the work. Untitled (Fire Song’s) draws directly from an image of the 1966 Le Mans race, when Firestone tires and Ferodo brakes vied for ad space along the track, but here Song’s Automotive Service of Silverlake Boulevard joins the fray as an embossed detail. The familiar orange globe of a 76 gas station, the quotidian lettering of the neighborhood smog check, or the peculiar shape of a strip mall sign – Raos collects and honors these ordinary visual moments, and perhaps teaches his viewers to do the same, to find beauty in the eccentricity and glamor amid the exhaust-pipe grime.
The exhibition continues in the downstairs gallery, where it fully leaves the slick world of racing behind in favor of the ubiquitous handmade palimpsest of Los Angeles auto shop signage. The sun has set on these pictures, leaving the viewer only with glimpsed pronouncements in the inky black: SERVICE, REPAIR, TUNE-UP, ELECTRICAL, and, most provocatively, GOD. All featured text has been culled from real-world auto shops, and the installation gives the sense of paintings caught in the middle of a clandestine midnight gathering. This final series lends its title to the exhibition: “slow and steady wins the race.” While this may not always hold true on the circuit, the aphorism aptly describes Raos’s scrupulous approach to his practice. It is precisely the slowness of the process that allows these elegant compositions to shine.
No Escaping the Housework, Charlie James gallery, Los Angeles, 2022
June 4, 2022 - July 9, 2022
Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present a solo show of Los Angeles-based artist Kristopher Raos titled No Escaping the Housework, opening June 4th at the gallery from 6-9pm. This show is Kristopher’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
In his latest series of paintings, Los Angeles artist Kristopher Raos adopts the aesthetics of advertising, exploiting the bold color and pop fonts of packaging for their formal possibilities and real-world associations, abstracting via adept cropping and clever manipulations. At the core of the group is a series of [twelve] small paintings, each riffing on a different vintage household cleaning product. Executed in deft, precision brushwork at a scale that mirrors that of old-fashioned detergent boxes, the works exist in the sweet spot between surface and object. Raos manifests the formal energy usually associated with much larger works; they seem to extend beyond the borders of the canvas.
The labor of painting and the labor of daily life are here intricately connected. Raos recaptures time spent performing household tasks as a kind of aesthetic research, transforming the stuff of the world into fodder for the studio. It is an act of both recognition and elevation: a recognition of the abstract potential of midcentury commercial art, and an elevation of that material into something more. The results are a kind of Pop-inflected minimalism – hard edge by way of the corner drugstore.
Elsewhere in the series, Raos expands the project in several interesting directions. A series of paintings on paper and canvas explores in depth the deep navy and yellow packaging for “All” detergent; each work reveals a slightly different section, and in this way guides the viewer’s eye through the exercise of recognition. Other works incorporate the shaped canvases and urban signage that characterize Raos’
Open Late/”7 Days a Week”, As-is, Los Angeles, 2021
July 17, 2021 - August 28, 2021
as-is.la presents new artworks by Los Angeles artist Kristopher Raos. Ostensibly about the vernacular environment of Los Angeles, such pleasantly familiar content—the commercial streetscape as viewed from a moving car—operates as a kind of placeholder for the artist’s rather more surprising and somewhat more muscular deployment of form. And while the artworks share common imagery and constitute a coherent whole, these seven acrylic on canvas paintings and works on paper speak in several different formal registers—big and small, smooth and textured, vibrantly colored and relatively colorless, oddly shaped and crisply rectilinear, floor-based and wall-mounted—thus proceeding through an inventory of possibilities, the very success of which directs some of our attention (and subsequent questions) back to the white box of the exhibition space itself.
Andy Warhol famously defined Pop Art as “taking the outside and putting it on the inside [and then] taking the inside and putting it on the outside.” Raos, a young Mexican-American building upon both his own earlier experience as a street artist and his current interest in the genre of hard-edge abstraction, has come to a similar conclusion, here bringing the two—outside and inside, streetscape and art gallery—into a richly provocative if necessarily unresolved tension.
