Royale Projects to open in downtown L.A. arts district
Phillip K. Smith III’s art installation “Lucid Stead” — a wooden shack tricked out with mirrored slats and multicolored LEDs — lighted up Joshua Tree a few years back, ultimately becoming an Internet sensation. Now the Palm Desert gallery that coordinated the project and represents Smith, Royale Projects Contemporary Art, is adding another pop of color to the downtown L.A. arts district.
Husband-wife duo Rick Royale and Paige Moss will open their 6,500-square-foot gallery in a former arts district toy warehouse this month. Composed of two airy galleries and a more intimate project space, Royale Projects officially opens Sept. 19 with a 30-year survey of work by post-conceptual artist Ken Lum. The Canadian native is exhibiting a solo project at Vienna’s Kunsthalle Wien; he also has shown at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. The Royale Projects survey will be Lum’s first solo exhibition in Southern California.
Royale Projects specializes in contemporary, midcareer artists whose work is rooted in either abstract or conceptual art. Since 2008, the gallery has had three different spaces in the Palm Springs area. It showed conceptual and earth artist Dennis Oppenheim’s last solo exhibition of new work before he died in 2011 as well as light and space movement pioneer Helen Pashgian’s work preceding her 2014 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But Royale and Moss’ first art venture before setting up shop in the desert was the experimental, cross disciplinary space Popomatic in downtown L.A. in the early 2000s.
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“There’s something really special about the desert,” Royale says. “But the L.A. art scene is just so explosive right now. Since about 2013, it’s really gotten its feet stable, even internationally. Artists are moving here, young artists, contemporary artists. It’s exciting to return; we wanted to be part of that dialogue.”
Before its official debut, Royale Projects has been in previews with an exhibition of work by L.A. artist David Allan Peters.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Peters offered a tour of his brightly colored, meticulously layered paint carvings. Patience is key to his process, he said. Peters paints a single, candy-colored hue on wood panels, then waits for it to dry. Then he adds another layer of paint — again and again, during the course of a year, until the layers stack up several inches thick. Then Peters carves grid-like patterns into the paint block, revealing different colors at different depths.
The result is a psychedelic smattering of what looks to be tiny peacock feathers; but at a distance, surprising patterns emerge. Collectively, the works pop against the gallery’s freshly painted white walls and lofty, bow truss ceiling.
Peters’ newest series — abstract works made of paint dust and copper wire encased in transparent resin — is the opposite, tonally. A murkier palette of deep greens and grays have a spacey, starscape quality. But his two bodies of work on view at Royale Projects are bound by a juxtaposition: Explosive, free-wheeling designs ultimately reveal structured, grid-like form.
A selection of Peters’ work will be on view during the Lum opening. An artist’s reception is 5 p.m. Sept. 19, and an open house is from noon to 5 p.m. Sept. 20. Both events are open to the public.
Royale Projects, 432 S. Alameda St., Los Angeles; entrance on Seaton Street. royaleprojects.com
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