Interview by Mia Milosevic

Heavily intertwined with the work of the Chicago Imagists, artist Darius Airo has derived a decent amount of his contemporary style from the group of representational artists. Imbued with the quintessential imagery and pop iconography of the Imagists, Airo’s work fuses these art historical trends with his own inclination for surrealist imagery and the grotesquerie. His romanticization of public space is influenced by these same artistic roots, but is guided by the poetry he writes. Airo interweaves the quotidian with the romantic through his poetic approach to painting and drawing, unintentionally highlighting the exceptional in the mundane. 

Airo has two shows happening concurrently in Los Angeles. His show Dense at Central Server Works is a collaboration between him and Jim Mooijekind. The respective artists’ work operates in tandem; the paintings are in conversation with one another, all generally characterized by the abstracted figure and its gaze. Casual Banter at Face Guts is a sort of retrospective of Airo’s drawings from the last ten years, curated by photographer Joshua White. The drawings are filled with kinetic figural forms seemingly capable of conversing amongst themselves.

MIA MILOSEVIC: Maybe we can start with you telling me about yourself…as an artist, how you got your start, your inspirations. 

DARIUS AIRO: I’m from Chicago, I was born there. I’ve been there my whole life. I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) for undergrad, which helped me get a better grasp on my career, as undergrad does. I did some studio assistant work early on for an artist named Tony Fitzpatrick. It was instrumental to how I piece together images and navigate the business. My father is an artist as well. He’s worked as an illustrator, sculptor, and animator. 

MILOSEVIC: I heard that you are “absolutely endowed in the work of the Chicago Imagists.” 

AIRO: Oh yeah, for sure. They're huge in Chicago. Most of them taught at SAIC. A handful of them while I was there. I felt they were excited about the same imagery and pop iconography that I am, like drawing in a really romantic way. Upon graduating, I was in a group show in New York that was a bunch of emerging Chicago artists and a bunch of work with the Imagists, which was so rad to have work hanging next to artists that I love. I carried this–I don’t know if I’m supposed to say it–but we got this really expensive Jim Nutt drawing, and so I was carrying this Jim Nutt drawing on the fucking train across the bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and it was horrifying. It was really scary. Like it was facing me, I’m guarding it with my life. 

MILOSEVIC: You’re really connected to the Chicago Imagists. I know they incorporate a lot of surrealist technique and I see a lot of that in your work. Do you have any inspiration you draw specifically from surrealist artists? 

AIRO: I think about Gertrude Abercrombie–that’s the surrealism that I like, but that might be pushing it. They’re pretty mellow. Or, Yves Tanguy I love, but also kind of pushing it. You know, the surrealist quality of the Imagists work is about the absurd or kind of grotesque cartoon figuration and a much more pop sensibility, whereas the surrealism I’m into or how I engage with it feels like a different vein of art history.

MILOSEVIC: I notice the absurd or grotesque in your work. What are you drawn to about those specific things? 

AIRO: Yeah it’s like making art and being invested in it is a silly thing to do in the grand scheme of the world. It’s inherently abject when you’re making work that’s a reflection of you, and I think you have to laugh at everything so you don’t freak out and be miserable 24/7. You have to laugh at yourself and embrace the abject, so that’s really where it comes from. It’s a reflection of myself through an abject lens…but also I love myself too. 

MILOSEVIC: They go together. 

AIRO: Yeah, for sure. Love and hate are not opposites, you know? 

MILOSEVIC: Or if you’re allowed to be abject about yourself, then that’s self-love?

AIRO: Yes, totally. Self-acceptance, right? 

MILOSEVIC: I really wanted to talk to you about your upcoming shows in Los Angeles, one of them being Dense with Jim Moojiekind, opening in Venice at Central Server Works. 

AIRO: Jim and I have been connected for years through Instagram, and developed a friendship at the beginning of the pandemic. We were sending each other some work and followed each other’s practice a bit. It was both of our instincts to see if we could open a show that would put our work in conversation. We’re excited about so much of the same stuff formally, sharing the same branches of the art history tree. It made sense that the work would go together. I don’t think he or I made work to accommodate the other, it was about making what made sense with the collaboration in mind, and then finding those connections afterwards. Something really beautiful happened there, where his work is incredibly reflective of him–it’s super personal and there are all these icon-figures that are stand-ins for pieces of him–and the work I made is very much about the viewer, about a person looking at something. My work is kind of looking at his work, and I like that relationship, where one is showing and one is looking. 

MILOSEVIC: So the collaboration really begins as a conversation between the two of you. 

AIRO: Those conversations were integral to understanding what was going on in each other’s lives. I would see stages, he would see stages, but it was so much more about just kind of taking each other’s temperatures. It was pretty blind.

MILOSEVIC: In the press-release for Dense, it talks about how both you and Jim’s work is characterized by the “abstraction of the figure as a way of exploring psychologically charged subject matter.” I love the idea of abstraction as a form of storytelling…can you tell me more about how this plays a role in your work? 

AIRO: I have a pretty particular process in making these works, and they’re based on a poem that’s formatted as a list of instructions on how to make one of the paintings. I think I’m the only one that can follow the instructions…like I don’t think they’re universal. But the poem is about going for a walk as I leave the studio and I’m walking and I’m looking at everybody and looking at everything and every once in a while–whenever it happens–there’s someone, and I look at them and they’re probably looking at me and maybe they’re not, but there’s a moment where I know they’re the person that I need to paint next and I run home as fast as I can–put the jets on, hit the Buck 50–and go paint them in one sitting. It’s so much about memory and reckoning with the public. Meeting eyes with someone in a public space, there’s like a million different versions of that. A lot of the time it’s really frightening, the public is super scary, but there’s also these moments that are really easy to romanticize or kinda funny. All the work is environmentally responsive and I think that I’m so charged by the people that share spaces with me and if I can find the energy of space through looking at someone, that’s the goal. That’s how I know I found the right person and can run home after staring at them like a crazy person.

MILOSEVIC: I love what you said about how you and Jim’s shared realities come together in this show. You’re taking your walk on the street, and bringing it to Jim’s walk on the street. 

AIRO: Well, I think the work is about him walking down the street and largely mine is too, but he’s the one painting himself. 

MILOSEVIC: He’s the subject. 

AIRO: Yes, I think they’re mostly self-portraits, maybe he’d be mad at me saying that but I don’t think so. They’re incredibly honest and abject in this beautiful, funny way which romanticizes the things that we’re conditioned to feel really strange about in our own bodies. Every painting in the show is a close-up of a figure, and they have a gaze, and it’s very much about their gaze. I feel like that moment where I share that gaze with a person, it’s being transcribed as a gaze onto his work. 

MILOSEVIC: The title of the show is Dense. I feel like I can assume this might have something to do with the public, your work on the street, or the density of your environment… 

AIRO: Jim picked the title. But I think that makes a lot of sense, that’s why I was cool with it. It makes sense in his work because he’s unpacking a lot. And it’s kinda funny too, dense like dumb. It’s abject. 

MILOSEVIC: Right. Jim must love himself too. 

AIRO: Oh, must. We wouldn’t be here together if he didn’t. 

MILOSEVIC: I was hoping to also talk about Casual Banter, your solo-show at Face Guts which is curated by Joshua White. I love the name of the exhibition first of all, I feel like I’m already gonna like the work when I hear the name, it almost doesn’t matter what it is. 

AIRO: I make a ton of drawings. “Casual banter” was written on one of the drawings I sent to Josh, and he picked the title. There are little moments of poetry or quotes from other people–it’s scattered on my drawings, it’s the most liberated part of my practice, and writing is a tremendous part of that. I didn’t know what we were gonna title the show. I ended up sending him like 70 drawings, all from the last ten years, so that drawing is years old and it was the one that stuck out to him, I think for the same reason. There’s a lot of figures–figural forms–that I think are all talking to each other, especially with the way this show is installed, it makes a lot of sense.

MILOSEVIC: You incorporate a lot of your poetry into your work…you’re a poet? 

AIRO: No…but I guess so. I’ll avoid the title. I like being a painter, or somebody who makes drawings more. I think making some poetic work is important, well it’s about romanticizing everything around me, so that’s kind of poetic-sounding, right? But the drawings, because they’re more liberated and free and less pressurized, I feel a little more comfortable sharing writing. I’m soft-dropping poetry with this drawing show, you know? A microdose. 

MILOSEVIC: Nice. Does your writing make a feature in both Casual Banter and Dense? 

AIRO: In Casual Banter there are drawings with small blurbs of poems and stanzas and shit all over the place. The work I made for Dense is all based on a poem I wrote that served as a mode of operation for making them. It’s what I was saying about going on the street and going for that walk, so that’s formatted as an instructional poem. 

MILOSEVIC: How does Casual Banter incorporate some of the abject we were talking about earlier? 

AIRO: I think it’s probably more forward in the drawings than it is in the paintings. Or a lot closer to a formal conversation with the Imagists and Leon Golub and all of these Chicago artists that I really love. And a lot of cartoon stuff too which is kind of the same thing. [Theodor] Adorno hated cartoons–because you’re laughing at something getting hurt and it’s okay because it’s not a human form. I think about that a bunch.

MILOSEVIC: Are you more drawn to working on paper than other mediums? 

AIRO: I wouldn’t say I’m more drawn to it. I feel like when I’m drawing, I’m drawing a lot. When I’m painting, I’m not really drawing, but I’m painting and writing a lot. Drawing feels like a necessary thing I love that I’ll always be connected to, and painting is the same, but painting I feel like I have to take more seriously. Or it has to be more challenging. I can make a stack of drawings that aren’t for anyone but me, that are on computer paper or with a pen I stole from a hotel, and I can love them and they can be doing a lot for me. It’s like a therapeutic practice, like sprinting, drawing a bunch of drawings. But the paintings–I love taking them seriously and being nerdy and romantic about them, and wanting them to fight me and wanting them to be the best objects that I can make. So they’re a lot harder for me to make. Because I force them to be. 

MILOSEVIC: Something about painting on a canvas, it feels like if it’s not good, you wasted a canvas. But there’s a dispensability to the paper– 

AIRO: Yes, it’s like how do you get as far away from that as possible. I made a book, I called it Lucky Drawings, and I was taking stacks of computer paper and just leaving them on my kitchen counter and the studio. I’d put a stack in my back-pocket for a long walk or a trip, and I made a couple hundred in a few months, and they made me really happy. They were maybe the most forward presentation of my poetry and really honest moments from conversations I would have while I made them. They were my favorite things I ever made but they’re on the worst paper ever and that’s exactly why. They were so liberated from material and so liberated from any pressure that I would put on the seriousness of making an art object in a commercial setting. So I printed them into a book, and it makes me super happy to see them forever, that way. 

MILOSEVIC: I wanted to go back to your seriousness around the canvas. What helps you get over this kind of thing? It feels like when you take something really seriously, it’s hard to do anything. 

AIRO: I think fearlessness is really important when you’re trying to make something. Like finding a really wonderful moment in a painting that still isn’t a final object, but then not being afraid to ruin those moments. Being willing to scrape off the whole painting because if you did it once and you ruin it then you can do it again, maybe just better. You learn something. I make a lot of stuff and edit it down, always. And destroy lots of work that I don’t like. But I don’t have a huge issue with getting stuck or feeling like I don’t know where to go, which I feel very fortunate for. 

MILOSEVIC: One of your books is titled An American Manic and one article written about you actually refers to you as “an American manic.” Did you give yourself that title? 

AIRO: Yes, I gave it to myself. I don’t know if I’d call myself an American manic, but they sure did. It was really eclectic source material. I was 22 or 23 when I made that book and really reveling in being an angry early twenty-something. Maybe not angry but just moody, all over the place, maybe a little manic? It was poetry and digital images and drawings that I would tinker with. It was haphazardly put together on Photoshop and the last thing I made in undergrad at SAIC to accompany my first solo-show in Chicago.

MILOSEVIC: I saw this article today from “Art in America” while I was reading through some of your work…it’s titled “Ugly painting in New York is getting uglier, and that’s good news.” I thought you’d definitely have an opinion on this… 

AIRO: I don’t think any of those ugly paintings are very ugly. They’re all pretty beautiful, which is funny. I think making an ugly art object is always gonna be beautiful. I don’t know. You made a thing that you love that just exists with other art. How is that gonna be ugly? I think being kinda tongue-in-cheek and silly about “breaking the rules” is giving MFA. That’s what you do in a studio program, like grad school you stop doing all the shit you did in undergrad. Ugly stuff is beautiful too, I guess that’s my opinion. 

MILOSEVIC: That seems like the consensus for a lot of people. It’s trending. In one other interview I read, you described your work as “an over-seasoned sauce made of everything you look at and interact with”…I feel like that idea of the “over-seasoned” is really interesting and could be something that definitely sets you apart from other artists?  

AIRO: I think that’s in tandem with the hyper-romanticization of the practice. Jumping into it and attacking this thing, being really physical with an object and having that corny battle with a painting. I think that's how you’re over-seasoned. You know, you get an artist who makes really beautiful photoshopped documents and then projects them and takes a long time and they’re very meticulous, it’s really careful–they followed the recipe. I don’t think I do that and I think that’s an integral part of my practice. Even having an image in mind or the person that I saw walking down the street, sometimes they come out really fast and I’ll finish one of them in a week or sometimes I’m fighting the same surface for months. 

Casual Banter is on view through October 7 @ Face Guts, 4134 Verdugo Road, Los Angeles, 90065

Dense is on view through November 18 @ Central Server Works, 517 Victoria Avenue, Venice, 90291