Issuu

RAFFI KALENDERIAN

When looking at the paintings in the exhibition Bathers (Nothing Comes From Nothing), Los Angeles’s recent history is felt through a different measure of time than your own. Kalenderian has been active in the city’s art scene for decades and has seen its tide ebb and flow. In these paintings, the city’s fine art scene has felt like a living organism—shimmering on the surface, densely networked underneath. Sometimes, it’s a conspiratorial night at a bar with friends, golden sunlight rudely slicing through the shutters. Other times, it’s a lonely midnight drive, the world drained of sound beneath the haze of streetlights.

The people Kalenderian paints are the ones who shape the tempo and texture of his timeline. A familiar cast cycles through—faces you might recognize from past shows, late-night conversations, or someone else’s Instagram story—alongside newer artists just starting to appear on the scene. Together, they form a kind of living cross-section of the Los Angeles art world, spanning age, recognition, and creative momentum. These are the Bathers. This is what Kalenderian calls the “jungle gym of the LA painting community”— a web of artists climbing, swinging, slipping off, and reappearing again. His paintings work like a visual oral history that is less interested in hierarchy than in presence. “If you don’t remember someone,” he says, “this is me saying you should.”

Color, like scent, can vault us back in time. It grounds us in place—not through symbols, but through sensation. The sun-bleached drapes in a friend’s bedroom. The silken, virile fur of a black-and-white puppy not yet fully a dog. The way the chrome blue of a Toyota Cressida changes, as it still manages a reflection of a distant sunset through a film of dust and road grit.

Nick Lowe, Parked Car (Green), 2024, Acrylic on canvas in artist’s frame, 24 x 30 inches (61 x 76.2 cm)

Jonas Wood, Untitled, 2024, Colored pencil and graphite on paper, 9 x 6 1/4 inches (22.9 x 15.9 cm)

Kalenderian’s psychedelic color palette sublimates memory. The searing reds, magentas, and oranges are hallucinatory, and they reject practical memories for the emotional charge of a moment. The psychedelic storms imprint themselves on our souls with an intensity that matches real memory. Every feverish color pushes the image to its emotional extreme. It’s not realism, but a kind of sensory memory at full volume. Through this chromatic haze, he proffers a snapshot memory that is like a spiritual totem. We carry these fleeting, half-formed images, not for any narrative clarity or profound meaning but for the feeling they elicit.

Throughout the show, the window becomes a kind of hinge between worlds—the interior life of the artist and the exterior sprawl of the city, the past or some imagined elsewhere. Sometimes the windows are architectural; other times they feel more psychic.

Take his piece Alberto (Staring at the Sea) (2025). This is a portrait of Kalenderian’s fellow painter Alberto Cuadros, who gazes out his window to the ocean. Kalenderian says that it is the “pace car” of this show, in which different characters interact with windows in some way. Cuadros’s stance is the most straightforward version of this; it’s a pose we’ve seen throughout art history. Salvador Dalí’s early work Figure at a Window (1925) comes to mind—a quiet meditation on proximity and perception, and a notably realistic painting by the grandfather of surrealism. But surrealism plays into both paintings subtly—through the inclusion of an impossible, nonexistent shoreline. It’s as if the homes are floating in the middle of the ocean.

Lari Pittman, Untitled, 2019, Acrylic, spray paint, ink, colored pencil and permanent marker on Arches paper, 22 3/8 x 30 inches (56.8 x 76.2 cm)

Laura Owens, Untitled, 2014, Oil and screen-printing ink on linen, 30 x 26 inches (76.2 x 66 cm)