No Escaping the Housework

ExhibitionPast

May 19

Kristopher Raos
No Escaping the Housework

969 Chung King Road
JUNE 4 - JULY 9, 2022

SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)

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’ wider practice, tying this series into a particular Los Angeles landscape that has long served as a fruitful source of visual information.

Kristopher Raos [ b. 1987 • Bakersfield,CA ] is a self-taught painter living and working in Los Angeles, CA. He illustrates his interest in Humor, precise (DIY) techniques, and attention to craft through an expansive range of visual languages - large and small scale paintings, sculpture, and drawings. He has had solo exhibitions at As-is Gallery and MaRs Gallery and has exhibited in group exhibitions at Torrance Art Museum, Peripheral Space, RDFA, and Keystone Art Space.

Artist Instagram: @kristopher_raos

Text by Ashley Park