James Fuentes is pleased to present Wayfaring Stranger in Los Angeles, a group exhibition featuring works by Ned Armstrong, Zuzanna Bartoszek, and Dylan Solomon Kraus—three artists who share a dialogue around the narrative and atmospheric capacities of figurative painting. A deliberate flatness of painting and a restrained, meditative use of color inflect their uncanny tableaux with a highly personal interiority. The artists’ own histories shape their retro-futurist storytelling, converging fragments of memory with elements of cultural imagination drawn from film and literary representations.

Despite their sustained artistic dialogue and shared approach to visual language, Armstrong, Bartoszek, and Kraus take distinct stylistic turns. Shaped by a childhood spent hiking and camping, Dylan Solomon Kraus’ paintings reflect human encounters with vast natural and cosmic systems. At first, Kraus’ crepuscular landscapes read as almost monochrome, before the eye acclimates to recognize chess pieces rather than silhouettes of ordinary buildings, and a rolling ocean of water instead of a calm hillside. Slowly, each shade of blue seems to hold another. This delayed legibility folds his interest in symbolism and diagrammatic thinking into a kind of visual riddle, where recognition is staged as an event in time rather than something given all at once.

Ned Armstrong engages a process of building paintings out of accumulated scraps and studio detritus over a long, stop‑start timeline where a work might develop for months before being finished in a sudden five‑minute burst. In parallel, the works orbit the gap between everyday observation and the way memories reorganize what we’ve seen. Armstrong has described a desire to make “moment to moment” decisions in paint, giving the work a searching, provisional quality that remains open to surprise as figures, interiors, and streets move in and out of legibility. The titles of the works often further suggest the shuffled timeline of their making, refusing to impose a neat before‑and‑after logic on either image or story. 

As both a painter and poet, Zuzanna Bartoszek is largely self‑taught, learning from her painter father, peers, and the world itself. She treats images like “overpainted” texts, reflecting upon the ways in which contemporary life is shaped by image technologies by focusing on a single figure or gesture. Often resembling a film still or the afterimage of a dream, Bartoszek explicitly draws upon the tradition of existentialism, filtering it through self‑portraiture and domestic or transit interiors that become stand‑ins for the world at large. Using layers and erasures, the works communicate everyday life as a stage where deeply existential questions—freedom, responsibility, guilt, loneliness, and meaning—play out in small, intensely felt scenes.