Raffi Kalenderian at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

For his third exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Raffi Kalenderian presents new paintings that reflect his experimental approach to materials and surface.
Dense oil and encaustic portraits of Kalenderian’s friends and family evoke the effects of time on memory and representation. The figures sometimes dissolve or disintegrate into their surroundings, occasionally into the material of the painting itself. Exhibited alongside these new portraits are several large scale works, including landscapes – not the pastoral environments of an idealized natural world; but a reckoning of their own, impacted by crisis and activated by abstraction. In a departure from traditional modes of representational painting, Kalenderian uses figures and landscapes to negotiate inner and outer states. In these paintings an inventive approach to paint handling, where brush marks dissolve images, and darkness is built up in layers, creates moments where the mechanism of painting is its own subject.

Gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday 10 am to 6 pm and by appointment.