Conversations with Raymie Iadevaia

Today we’d like to introduce you to Raymie Iadevaia.

Hi Raymie, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Drawing like so many other artists, was my first gateway into a larger world. But also family provided my key into art. My grandparents came from Los Angeles by way of New York, Ellis Island, and Eastern Europe. My grandmother was an artist of multiple disciplines but mostly circled around music and theater. At the end of her life, she produced two jazz albums and even performed at a few venues in Los Angeles. My grandfather went to Cooper Union, but not for art and design as he wanted, his parents steered him to the engineering school. But they both always drew and I remember having a magical experience when going to their house. The house was full of objets d’art, numerous tchotchkes, theater masks of Comedy and Tragedy faces, marionette puppets, and life-size cat and dog statues surrounding various flora and fauna, ceramic forms, ornate fabrics covering chaise longues, armchairs, and the grand piano. There were reproductions of Impressionist and early Modernist paintings and paintings by artists unknown to me all hung around the house salon-style. It was a total gesamtkunstwerk. My grandmother made pastels of flowers and ink drawings of cartoonish figures and I remember one day that my grandfather made an imaginary treasure map using pen and ink. I got very into maps soon after that. Maybe all my paintings are a kind of journey into mapmaking?

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I recently read “What Painting Is” by James Elkins and one line really resonated with me: “Imagination is fluid, or it wants to be, and the very act of painting is an act of violence against the liquidity of our thoughts. A painting is frozen, and its permanence is very much unlike our evanescent ideas … But for the painter, the continuous partial freezing of each day’s work is also something unpleasant, like a necrosis creeping through healthy tissue.” I think this question about the liquidity of thought resonates so much with my practice. The question of when to take something further or when something is finished is one of those never-ending questions. It’s actually that question that is what makes continuity possible. That liquidity of thought is also about finding the rhythm and the ebb and flow of starting and stopping.

One challenge or obstacle that I’ve discovered over the past year is that my paintings have started to grow and get bigger and bigger. The work is beginning to push on the total capacity of my space. While it’s always great to find a certain limit, spatially, physically, and conceptually. It’s now starting to feel like a change is necessary to move forward. A big challenge heading into 2023 that I have been considering and thinking about is moving into a larger studio space. It brings a tremendous feeling of excitement and really ready to forge ahead, but it also comes with a lot of anxiety, fear, and self-doubt. But if I’ve learned anything from the last few years, it’s that resilience isn’t innate, it’s something that is continuously in flux and is a practice just like anything else. I also have learned that I need to remind myself that I have a strong community of friends, family, and colleagues that will be there when I need to reach out. So all in all, I think there will be very exciting possibilities and new challenges ahead.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I make paintings and drawings. I like to work with a lot of imagery all gathered up like a mound of flour as if in the process of making pasta from scratch. In this metaphor, the mound of flour are the ink drawings that I do each morning. Continuously expanding but also piling the imagery, collecting it in pages and pages of drawings in a linkage of days and months and now even years (my daily practice of drawing started just before the pandemic but crystallized during the first lockdown and subsequent quarantines and isolations at home). Images come from all over: memory, daily strolls, observations, imagined and found through the process. To extend the metaphor, the egg in the center of the flour mound or canyon are the paintings that emanate and secrete from the drawn pictures.

Swirling and mixing together to form a form and mass in fusing mark-making, with line, with color, and paint. In the accumulation of all that fusing and mixing, I would like to think about my work as having to do with sensations of travel. Traveling to new places or even seeing familiar things in strange new ways. And when I say “travel” that doesn’t mean going halfway across the world, it could mean taking a different way home, wandering in a different part of your neighborhood, or finding a close-by alcove of nature, unbeknownst heretofore. I think memory and imagination can be a kind of travel. Rediscovering and re-exploring and refreshing familiar places to see the same things differently is an aspect that I’m trying to paint.

Any big plans?
I have a lot coming up, which I’m very excited about! Opening later this month, November 20th, I’ll be in a two-person exhibition with the painter, Bruna Massadas, https://brunamassadas.com/ at BozoMag, https://bozomag.com. In December, I’ll have some paintings at NADA Miami with Halsey McKay Gallery, http://www.halseymckay.com  and The Pit. And also in December, I’ll be in a group show at Voda Gallery in Seoul, South Korea, https://vodagallery.com. Then in January 2023, I’ll have my first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at The Pit, http://www.the-pit.la.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.raymieiadevaia.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/raymieiadevaia/