CARTWHEEL loves being in the Downtown Los Angeles Arts District, supporting the artists and businesses, so presenting a solo exhibition from  Ramsey Chahine  at Daily Dose’s exhibition space #103 1820 Industrial Street was a natural match for us here at CARTWHEEL. The show runs through May 16.

“La Luta” features 25 works from Chahine, and reflect his background in poetry, mixed martial arts, and metaphysics, as well as art.

“La Luta” means The Fight–physical, spiritual, or emotional. It’s a synthesis of Ramsey’s identities, of discipline and recklessness, of the calculated and the spontaneous, the controlled and the free. From the artist’s statement:

Every one of my works is an incarnation of me and the ideas born through me. But I’m not so much an instigator as I am a receptacle. Images and colors arrive as sounds, like melodies, or chord progressions, instruments. The world that I know and feel is bound by sound, and it’s like we’re all blind but able to listen.

I regard my paintings and sculptures, as well as poems, as living, breathing things. They are guardian angels, saints, mothers, fathers, children, sacred stones…And this is what makes art necessary, it’s that we need it, or else life would be brutality. We all need fathers, mothers, children, and could all use another guardian angel…

Personal conflicts fuel the initiative. Deaths of friends and family, drug abuse by loved ones, distraction, confusion, not knowing…the sap of human life, the stuff that sticks to your fingers but nonetheless gives you life, that’s what my engine runs on. Maybe art is when God gets a fever. I know whenever I go into museums my hands get super hot, maybe that’s when you’re supposed to figure out that the art you’re looking at is worth something.

“La Luta” runs through May 16.