American figurative painter Raffi Kalenderian

By Chloe Magazine Splash Shop 3 Uncategorized February 14, 2017

Raffi Kalenderian is an American figurative painter whose work centers on the genres of portraiture and landscape painting. Kalenderian’s dense oil and encaustic portraits of 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. Kalenderian’s landscapes are not the pastoral environments of an idealized natural world, but rather a reckoning of their own, impacted by crisis and activated by abstraction. The paintings demonstrate 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. The residue of previous compositions is revealed as Kalenderian utilizes a palette knife to uncover drawings, under-paintings, and previous versions of his subjects and himself. This tension between erasure by excavation and the layering of material over previous images heightens the spectral mood of Kalenderian’s paintings. Each work contains the potential of a single moment rendered in many different forms; simultaneity as an infinity of potential outcomes.

Raffi Kalenderian lives and works in Los Angeles. Kalenderian graduated with a BA from UCLA in 2004. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland; the Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; Kunstmuseum St Gallen, St Gallen, Switzerland; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, USA, with an upcoming exhibition scheduled for November 2016 with Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy.