A Renowned Artist’s L.A. Renovation Added a Distinct Facade—and Kicked Off a Much Bigger Project
The perforated metal screens that cover Charles Gaines and Roxana Landaverde’s house pay homage to the grids found in Charles’s best-known work.
The perforated metal screens that cover Charles Gaines and Roxana Landaverde’s house pay homage to the grids found in Charles’s best-known work.
When you see them from the street, the perforated white metal screens seem a little on the nose. Layered onto the facade of the house that artist Charles Gaines and his wife, Roxana Landaverde, a historian focusing on Mesoamerican and Mexican art, are renovating, they look conspicuously like the grids that form the basis of Charles’s celebrated work. "I never really thought about it," he says of the resemblance as we prepare to tour the house on a beautiful Los Angeles day in April. I’m not sure I believe him. But in any case, the screens are the unifying element in what has become an ambitious building project.
Artist Charles Gaines plays the piano in the Los Angeles home he shares with his wife, art historian Roxana Landaverde. For years, a piano took up most of the living room until they asked TOLO Architecture to expand the space. The project eventually included adding a series of distinctive metal screens to the facade reminiscent of Charles’s work.
Photo: Daniel Dorsa
Layering things has been part of Charles’s work for decades. Beginning in the 1970s, he has created pencil drawings that plot a system of numbers rendered in corresponding colors on graph paper, with the clusters of filled-in cells forming the shape of, say, a tree. It was an unusual mix of a conceptual system underpinning a kind of representational art, and it undermined what Charles calls a false contradiction between intellect and affect. The numbers, with their analytical order, contrast with the colors and their emotional associations. But overlay them on top of one another and they add up to a legible image.
Photo: Daniel Dorsa
Charles compares his systems to musical notation. He played drums in various jazz groups in high school and college, and he now plays the piano avidly—Erik Satie is a favorite—though he is humble about his talent. It was a piano that led Roxana and Charles to renovate the 1990s home where they have lived for 20 years in the Mount Washington neighborhood.
A pendant light by Jorge Pardo hangs above the living room, while one of Charles’s pieces hangs next to the fireplace.
Photo: Daniel Dorsa
See the full story on Dwell.com: A Renowned Artist’s L.A. Renovation Added a Distinct Facade—and Kicked Off a Much Bigger Project
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