Painters' Painters: Nine Minutes with Raffi Kalenderian
Saatchi Gallery's latest exhibition Painters' Painters showcases a group of artists, who despite in recent years have seen a decline in painting, a medium challenged by the myriad of other modern media, continue to remain undeterred. Painters’ Painters pays tribute to artists who have forged their own intriguingly diverse paths and techniques and continue to contribute to the ongoing development of painting today. After Nyne's Jessica Rayner caught up with Raffi Kalenderian to gain an insight into his craft and work for the exhibition.
JR: Can you give After Nyne a brief look into your history as an artist, and how this has, in turn, affected your craft?
RK: I've been drawing for as long as I can remember. My older brother Morgan is a tattoo artist, he used to paint Iron Maiden album covers on the back of leather jackets when he was in high school. These paintings continue to be the coolest things I have ever seen and remain a huge inspiration to me. I went to UCLA for art school, but it was actually a year abroad at the University of Leeds where I truly fell in love with painting. The art program at Leeds was amazing: class one day a week and a key to a studio where you could do anything you like, with access 24 hours a day. I would travel to Paris and Madrid and look at the most incredible paintings, then come back to Leeds and paint. I learned to paint by buying oil paint, brushes, canvas, turpentine, and then going crazy in the studio. That year was perfect for me, since up to that point I had loved sculpting, film, ceramics....it was this amazing Nietzschean year: If you could do anything you wanted in the world, what would you do? For me, it was paint.
JR: Could you outline your main artistic influences and how these feed into your work?
RK: My professor at UCLA, Laura Owens, was a fantastic and important teacher for me. She introduced me to David Hockney and Alice Neel. I fell in love with both artists immediately, and still consider them to be my "art parents".
Last night I had an opening in Milan and wound up partying Italian style late into the night. Today has been hangover city, but I went to the Pinocoteca di Brera and hung out with Caravaggio and Tintoretto. I started coming back to life, plotting my next moves when I go back to LA.
JR: Can you talk through your work for the Painters’ Painter exhibition, what were the pieces trying to achieve and what inspired the work?
RK: Some of the work in this exhibition is 10 years old, so it is a bit like seeing a photo of yourself from high school. The people in my life are what inspires me. Portraiture is a wonderful way to mark time, consider someone's existence. One portrait is of my girlfriend at the time, Rachel. I painted her standing in front of a wooden gate outside her home in Echo Park. Wearing a zebra print undershirt that looked compelling against the woodgrain. She used to say her spirit animal was a zebra, so I also made a painting of zebras in a forest with sunflowers. A sort of love letter to her.
JR: How do you see your work developing in the next few years, is there a particular direction your craft is going to take?
RK: I love portraiture and will always maintain it as a discipline in my practice. Landscapes have been a big part of what I'm doing lately, trying to find new ways to breath life into old genres. I would love to make an entire exhibition about dancing. Voguing, waltzing, breakdancing, mamba, whatever.
Who knows? I love doing this precisely because I don't know exactly where the work is headed.
JR: How would you sum up the main themes involved in your work?
RK: A large portion of my work falls into a traditional mode of portraiture: get someone to sit in front of you and then observe and describe what you see with the brush. This work captures at least the physical characteristics of the sitter, their posture, their fashion sense, and hopefully some window into their interior world. Someone recently described my portraits as having an "awkward dignity", which I loved and think to be true. Portraiture has become an anchor for me, something I can always come back to as I indulge my freewheeling love affair with abstraction, distortion, and the endless possibilities of painting's materiality.
Another type of work I make uses the figures more like actors like in a stage play, a mise en scène. There are moments in my life where an important truth or idea becomes evident, often during a super mundane moment. Painting, to me, has this great potential for recreating this type of phenomenological moment. I think of it as a reckoning.
Hopefully people see my work as having some combination of vulnerability, intensity, strangeness and beauty...but I just make the stuff, man. Once it is out in the world, I can only cross my fingers and hope somebody feels it.
Painters' Painters
30th November - 28th February 2017
Saatchi Gallery
Duke Of York's HQ, King's Rd,
Chelsea, London SW3 4RY
