LA Te Quiero
LA Te Quiero
969 Chung King Road
January 18 - February 15, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: january 18, 5-8pm
SHOW CATALOG (PDF)
PRESS RELEASE (PDF)
Charlie James Gallery is proud to present LA Te Quiero - a group exhibition of gallery artists engaging with the LA landscape. Anchored by Patrick Martinez’s prescient recent series of paintings titled City on Fire, the exhibition engages the urban landscape of LA, its people, history, beauty and vulnerability. Flanking Patrick Martinez’s City on Fire paintings are two landscape paintings by Danie Cansino, each depicting elements of the East LA landscape captured at sunset. Elmer Guevara’s portraits of memory, specifically family memories of life growing up in South Central Los Angeles border Erick Medel’s thread paintings depicting scenes from contemporary Boyle Heights. Further animating the sense of the people of the city are Shizu Saldamando’s loving portraits of LA creatives Waylon Allison and Gabriela Ruiz. Luke Butler’s Location paintings depict period landscapes of Los Angeles taken from old television programs and adjoin Manuel López’s Hockney-esque portrait of the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Ozzie Juarez’s Te Quiero piece executed on paper mounted to fabricated metal gate is itself an emblem of the city and its resilience.
• Luke Butler’s work is a continuing investigation into the peculiar reality of popular culture. Inherently disposable, it is all but inseparable from our lives and is a genuine point of connection with other people. Luke’s work borrows its universal language and bends it toward subjectivity- to anxiety, masculinity, mortality, and a lifelong fascination with the figures that tell the stories.
Luke Butler (b.1971, San Francisco, CA) has an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BFA from The Cooper Union. His work is in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum, San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley Art Museum; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AK; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; The FLAG Art Foundation, NY; Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; and Crystal Bridges Museum, among others. His next solo show, "Color Pictures," will be at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, November 2nd- December 7th, 2024. Butler lives and works in San Francisco. He is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.
• Danie Cansino (b. 1986) is an artist and educator living and working in Los Angeles. Danie Cansino’s work manifests in bold chiaroscuro oil paintings and vividly rendered ballpoint drawings on loose-leaf paper, mounted to panel. The subject territory of her drawings and paintings originates from herself, her family members and close friends, and the geography of their shared surroundings - their homes, their neighborhoods, their city. The geographies of the work all stand in evidence of long-standing inhabitation by generations of Cansino’s people as they grow up, move forward, and pass on. Cansino describes her work as a love letter to her family, city, and culture, and a remembrance of the suffrage of the Chicanx and Latinx people of Los Angeles.
Cansino completed her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Southern California, and is an Adjunct Professor of USC Roski School of Art and Design. Cansino's work has been featured in ArtForum, Artillery, and ArtNews magazine. Her work resides in the collections of the Rubell Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, AltaMed, in addition to numerous private collections. She has exhibited in the Rubell museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, Muzeo museum, Vincent Price museum, UCLA, AMOCA, UTA Artists Space, Felix Art Fair, Human Resources Gallery, The Mistake Room, USC Roski, Tlaloc studios and Charlie James Gallery. Danie Cansino is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.
• Elmer Guevara (b.1990) was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. Guevara’s upbringing took place in the South Central neighborhood. In the 1980s, his parents fled a war-torn El Salvador finding refuge in the City of Angels. Along with South Central’s vibrant energy and the culture his parents brought with them, he became inspired to reflect on his upbringing and the hybridity of cultures along with the struggles his parents experienced with leaving and adapting to city dwelling. He often constructs narratives by sampling family photos from his youth, reframing compositions that form dialogue about identity and concepts of inter-generational trauma. Furthermore, he depicts observations from his own and neighboring immigrant families and surrounding environment. Reflecting on his adolescence and into his teenage years, he met with friends, commuting throughout the city on public transit and becoming obsessed with exploring the city’s crevices. This obsession later opened an appreciation for painting and an education in the arts.
In 2017, Guevara received a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Cal State University Long Beach and in 2022 an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College in New York City. Elmer’s work has been exhibited domestically and internationally at M&B Gallery, F2T Gallery, Residency Art Gallery, Lyles and King, and Barbati Gallery among others.
• Ozzie Juarez (b. 1991, Compton, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist who uses the realms of painting and sculpture to honor and revitalize ancient and recent cultural artifacts, languages, and histories. Inspired by the techniques, collaborations, ambitions, and ephemeral qualities of unsanctioned public art, Juarez incorporates excerpts of paintings he observes across the LA landscape into his own work. His ongoing interest in the construction of shared experiences and identities can be equally attributed to time spent as a scenic painter specializing in physical simulation at Disneyland. The omnipresence of American cartoon culture—with its roots in racial stereotypes and its exoticization of global cultures—weaves itself effortlessly into Juarez’s motifs.
Juarez earned his BFA from the University of California Berkeley. His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, England, Paris, Miami, and Mexico City and has been featured in publications including Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz magazine, Artillery Magazine, Purple Magazine, Yahoo News, LAist, BBC News and El Economista. Juarez is a pillar of the local arts community and in 2020 he founded TLALOC Studios, an artist-run community gallery and studio building in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles. TLALOC evolves with its members, providing a space that encourages and promotes the possibility of a sustainable life as an artist, or as Juarez says, “a lifestyle worth living.”
• Manuel López’s (b.1983, East Los Angeles, CA) drawings and paintings are informed by his immediate surroundings. Each piece is a careful examination of elements found around his environment: books, records, boxes, houseplants, various elements from his home, his neighborhood, and studio. López relies on observation, memories, materiality, touch, and presence to evoke a feeling of familiarity in the compositions. Manuel López grew up in Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. He attended East Los Angeles College, transferred to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where he earned his BFA in painting and drawing. He has exhibited in institutions, galleries, and museums internationally and nationwide including Crocker Art Museum, Atkinson Gallery at Santa Barbara City College, Baik Gallery - Seoul, Vincent Price Art Museum, Charlie James Gallery, and Self Help Graphics among others. He lives and works in East Los Angeles and is represented by Charlie James Gallery.
• Patrick Martinez (b. 1980, Pasadena, CA) earned his BFA with honors from Art Center College of Design in 2005. His work has been exhibited domestically and internationally in Los Angeles, Mexico City, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami, New York, Seoul, and the Netherlands, at venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian NMAAHC, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Vincent Price Art Museum, the Museum of Latin American Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the Rollins Art Museum, the California African American Museum, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and El Museo del Barrio, among others.
Patrick’s work resides in the permanent collections of The Broad, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA), Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Rubell Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the California African American Museum, the Autry Museum of the American West, the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Tucson Museum of Art, the Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, the University of North Dakota Permanent Collection, the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, the Crocker Art Museum, the Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University, the Manetti-Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, the Rollins Museum of Art, and the Museum of Latin American Art, among others.
Patrick was awarded a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, FL. In the fall of 2021 Patrick was the subject of a solo museum exhibition at the Tucson Museum of Art entitled Look What You Created. In 2022, Patrick was awarded a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Patrick’s suite of ten neon pieces purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art was a yearlong exhibition installed on the Kenneth C. Griffin Hall in the entrance of the Museum. Patrick Martinez’s “Ghost Land” exhibition was on view at the ICA San Francisco through January 2024. Through April 2024, Patrick’s work was shown at The Broad in Los Angeles as part of the exhibition “Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog)”. Patrick’s solo exhibition at the Dallas Contemporary Museum “Histories” was recently on view through January 2025.
Patrick lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.
• Los Angeles-based artist Erick Medel (b. 1992, Puebla, Mexico) creates intimate portraits of immigrant life using a sewing machine and thread much like one would use a paintbrush and oils. His canvas is deep blue heavyweight denim, which provides a dark ground that sets off the brightly colored threads that are his chosen medium. Medel draws inspiration from the vibrant Boyle Heights neighborhood outside of his studio, capturing street festivals, sidewalk scenes, and quiet moments in works that tenderly celebrate the joys of a thriving immigrant community.
Medel began working with textiles while completing his MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. This grew into an interest in soft sculpture that eventually became “thread paintings'' executed on heavy, dark denim stretched over a frame. Using a sewing machine as a drawing tool, he creates stitches that act like brushstrokes: quick staccato stitches emanate energy and movement, soft tender stitches follow the contours of a rose or even evoke the hazy spray of baby’s breath in a floral bouquet. Threads of different hues commingle on the surface, mixing visually rather than physically to create deft shading and texture. The resulting work appears soft when viewed from a distance, but up close it vibrates with expressive visual energy.
Medel moved to the United States from Mexico as a teenager, and he positions his work in the context of the wider history of immigrant labor. Denim provides a sturdy substrate to hold the weight of the built-up threads, but it also comes with its own context. It is Americana, both utilitarian and high fashion, but at its core is a fabric designed to protect the working class. This includes Medel’s father, a gardener, whose denim protected him from thorns. Medel’s floral compositions draw from the rich history of still life, but also serve as portraits of someone’s labor, honoring the street sellers and neighborhood florists whose hustle produces such beauty.
Medel elevates everyday moments large and small – a child holding the hand of her parent as they walk down the street, an arrangement from the local florist, couples dancing to sidewalk Banda music – snapshots of life that could easily be lost to time. Medel’s work beautifully conveys the joys as well as the hardships that together cohere into a vibrant portrait both personal and universal.
• Shizu Saldamando’s work depicts American social spaces through portraiture. Her work celebrates peers, friends, and loved ones through paintings and drawings that honor the brief moments of connection that occur throughout daily life. Shizu was born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission District and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from UCLA School of Arts and Architecture and her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts.
Solo exhibitions include LA Intersections, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA; Shizu Saldamando, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; To Return, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; When You Sleep: A Survey of Shizu Saldamando, Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; All Tomorrow’s Parties, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA. Selected group exhibitions include: Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 at MOCA Los Angeles, Phantom Sightings at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Trans-Pacific Borderlands, part of the Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA; We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles, an official collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale; Drawing the Line at Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA and The High Art of Riding Low at the Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles, CA.
Saldamando’s work resides in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, Princeton University Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California,The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Art Museum Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Mexican Art, Fidelity Collection, Cleveland Clinic Collection, and numerous other public and private collections. Saldamando lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by Charlie James Gallery.
