Kristopher Raos Painter/Piloto (Slow and steady wins the race)

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.