Gallery 169 is pleased and excited to announce drawings and paintings by Charles Arnoldi. Chuck is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker who came to Los Angeles from Dayton Ohio. Producing art since the 1970's Chuck continues to be one of the most productive abstract painters in America, pushing himself to create, consummately blending meaning with beauty. When Chuck walks into the room you can't help but notice. His enthusiasm and optimistic approach to life permeates his art. Taken from an essay written by Dave Hickey in 2008 Chuck is quoted and described eloquently.
As my grandmother would say whenever the occasion presented itself, "It's not right, but it's so." So, even though Charles Arnoldi, today, is a mature and profoundly innovative artist at the zenith of a thirty-year career, to the Venice Beach artists with whom his life and career has always been associated, he is still "the kid"-the d'Artagnan of the Venice Musketeers, prone to spontaneous acts of profound innocence, generosity, enthusiasm and aesthetic impropriety.
He shares with them a passion for the material world and a commitment to unflagging studio production; he shares their comfort level with the business of the art business and with the insouciance of California social life. But he's still "the kid." Like Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode and Billy Al Bengston he is a refugee from the flat banality of the American Middle West, from the concrete grids of streets called Elm and Jefferson punctuated with Circle K's and hardware stores. Like them, he came to Los Angeles to be a commercial artist and fell among evil companions.