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.

Text by Ashley Park

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’

Text by Ashley Park

Open Late/”7 Days a Week”, As-is, Los Angeles, 2021

July 17, 2021 - August 28, 2021

Installation views

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.

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.