Artist Sells First Work Through Cella Satellite Galleries

Back in March, threw an art show called in a warehouse on Burbank Boulevard in North Hollywood.

We here at Patch find the Cella Satellite Galleries concept to be , and in an effort to know more about Cella's impact we looked at the show from two sides. Eric Reuveni, the commercial real estate broker for the property, shed light on things . Today, our conversation with a young artist who sold his first piece of art at the show examines how Cella helps artists find an audience.

CS-Navarrete's work can be found and followed on his Facebook page.

PATCH – What were you doing before graffiti art?

NAVARRETE – I was always involved in art, from elementary school all the way through high school. I was always in all the events in classes. I think all my influences at a young age came from Japanese animation. A lot of Peruvian motifs and textiles and mosaics and patterns that I would see recurring in a lot of the ornaments and goods that family members would bring back from Peru, because my dad is from Peru, so our house was always decorated in a lot of Peruvian artwork. The aesthetic always stood out. I think somewhere around high school I started fusing the mechanical, robotic art that I would get from the Japanese series and stuff and what I was seeing in Peruvian art. If you look at old Peruvian hieroglyphs and if you read the folklore about a lot of ancient technologies coming from outer space and supreme beings bestowing their knowledge on indigenous folk, I just started fantasizing about that and fusing those two styles together.

High school came around and I was in all the art classes but I think it came down to just having a poor art program there, and the thing is, the program really sucked. The teacher there just didn’t give us guidance or give us the resources there. After high school I was kind of lost.

PATCH – Where was that, where did you go to high school?

NAVARRETE – I ended up going to Highland in Palmdale in the high desert.

PATCH – Ah, I used to write for the Antelope Valley Press, so I know Palmdale well. I was a sports writer there.

NAVARRETE – Ah, OK. I ended up living in Palmdale for a time, from like 7th grade through 12th grade. But before that I grew up in North Hollywood.

PATCH – Where you go to school in North Hollywood?

NAVARETTE– North Hollywood was Madison Junior High and Coldwater Canyon Elementary. When I was in North Hollywood I was really influenced not just by the Peruvian stuff, but that’s when graffiti art started breaking into L.A. at the time. And so I dabbled a little bit in graffiti then, but I put it on the backburner and started developing my own art. But I think graffiti always stayed with me. I got into tagging in Palmdale there for a while and got into a little bit of trouble. So I got out of high school and I didn’t really know where to go. Nothing really interested me much. Science was always cool and mathematics always amazed me, I was always drawn to it but I never really applied myself enough to go anywhere with the mathematics so artwork was pretty much the saving grace. It kept me out of a lot of trouble and kept me inside painting.  But I got wrapped into some trouble with the local crews that wanted me to be in their graffiti crew and go tagging for them but I didn’t want any part of it because it’s a lot of BS with street politics that you don’t want to get wrapped up into. People get beat up and shot over it. The lines get blurred between what graffiti artists do and what gangsters end up doing and it just becomes a big mess.

I ended up joining the military. I joined the 18th Airborne Corps, 51st Signal Battalion and I was airborne. I used to jump out of airplanes and I went into air assault and helicopter repelling and this and that. So I did four years in the army instead of going to a university or art school, which should have been what I did. When I got out of the army I realized I didn’t want any part of that world anymore. So when I got out I was very, very focused on getting out of school at all costs. I just went right back to AVC and knocked out my general eds that I had started in the army.

PATCH – Antelope Valley Community College?

NAVARRETE – Yeah, I went to AVC for a little while.

PATCH – That’s a pretty good school. As far as community college’s go.

NAVARRETE – AVC is not bad. I think my two favorite schools were PCC and Glendale Community Colleges. AVC is not bad. I’m not going to knock it. But I went to all of them, and after that I always wanted to go to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, so I inquired about their night classes and put some money together … and I ended doing a an illustration/fine art minor and I also dabbled in some classes in 3D modeling and Gnomon School of Visual Effects. I took digital sculpture and 3D software packages, it was pretty cool. And then I started just working in the industry doing storyboarding and commercials.

PATCH – Well how did you end up getting involved in the Cella Gallery show?

NAVARRETE – I just got to the point where the commercial work wasn’t that gratifying in exploring me and my artwork. I just got bored with rendering. … So Rootsystem is something I came up with as an artist name and as a style because I wanted to come up with something new and fresh that no one was doing, and I noticed there was a resurgence of street art doing really well with marketability and being sold in galleries and that’s definitely part of my roots as well. But I didn’t want to stick to letterform. I didn’t want to be bound by those parameters. I thought it would be interesting to develop a style that is more just pure form, and I just started to think about what all my influences were, kind of just pin them all on the wall. And I would just stare at them and draw correlations and connections between them all and started playing around with different styles, like how subway systems look superimposed over land surveys and printouts of topographical maps and patty fields and thinking about if you subdivide a right triangle and project that line through and plot that trajectory then that in essence could be a rudimentary system to create these roots, so the right triangle is treated as a seed that I would embed anywhere like you know, push it up in a corner, up against a ceiling and then I’d just keep dividing these triangles and figure out where I want these roots to go. So that would be like the underlying system to it. So after I set that, under those loose parameters I would embellish and go in with the more expressive gestural lines that aren’t bound by any parameters and just go with where I want to move the paint.

Getting into the show, Rootsystem is very new, it’s a new incarnation and I was only doing it for about a year and I met Shannon (Currie-Holmes) at an art show about a year ago in North Hollywood at her old location and I showed her what I was messing with, and she thought it was cool. And we kept in touch and that was it.

PATCH – And how many formal shows have you been involved in like that?

NAVARRETE – To be honest, with Rootsystem it was only like my fourth show. And it was interesting because I‘ve being getting a huge, positive response. And the two pieces that were at the Cella show I actually sold to a celebrity.

PATCH - Can you tell me which one?

NAVARRETE – Blair Herter. He’s on the G4 channel. He does a gaming show. I’m not saying he’s like a Hollywood A-lister, but it’s pretty cool, right?

PATCH – No, that’s very cool. I would also imagine having grown up in North Hollywood as a kid and to have sold your first piece or artwork there must also pretty cool to have done it -

NAVARETTE – Not far from where I grew up, yeah, that was pretty interesting. I don’t know if it really dawned on me. Now that you bring it up, yeah, it’s pretty cool. The warehouse was a lot further out. I used to live at like Victory and Whitsett, so I mean I didn’t really think about it that much, but now that you raise the question, yeah, it is pretty cool that I did a show back in North Hollywood. What’s crazy is that out of the four other shows that I’ve had, no other pieces have sold, but these two pieces that did sell, which were the two biggest pieces I had, were dedicated to my mother, who currently is stage four with pancreatic cancer.

PATCH – Oh, man. I’m so sorry.

NAVARETTE – Yeah, and so I named one piece RS-07, which is an abbreviation for Rootsystem 07, cause it’s only the 7th piece that I’ve formally painted, the rest of it is all just ideas and sketches in my book that I’ve been developing for the last year.

PATCH – What was the show like? What do you think of what Shannon and Kenzie do?

NAVARRETE – Well they’re in the NoHo Arts District, and NoHo really isn’t necessarily known for like cutting edge or being very current in the street art or lowbrow or just the avante-garde visual arts scene. They are more of the theater-based performance community, and I think what they are doing is revitalizing the visual arts in the NoHo Arts District and hold their own, because I think right now it’s all about downtown Los Angels and Culver City is what’s really going on in the visual arts scene. So I just think they’re like two pioneers, they’re trying to make their mark in NoHo and start this scene and they’re handpicking and getting involved with artists that they admire and their vision is great. And I think the Cella Satellite Galleries is brilliant, with the state of the economy and all these empty businesses which are otherwise eyesores, they are seizing the opportunity to get these spaces lent to them to showcase art. And it’s exciting because it brings groups of people and positive energy to areas that otherwise wouldn’t have anything going on.