British Vogue: Artist Honor Titus Talks Punk And Painting Ahead Of His First London Exhibition
The Brooklyn-born, Los Angeles-based painter Honor Titus may have grown up in a musical household (his father, Andres “Dres” Titus, was in rap outfit Black Sheep), and he even formed his own hardcore band, Cerebral Ballzy, as a teen, but he takes a rather more literary approach to his dreamy, nostalgic paintings. “Music is still a big part of my practice, but literature gives me a ton of ideas,” says the 33-year-old, who cites Evelyn Waugh and Jean Genet, alongside the songs of Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground, as inspirations. “Sometimes a certain sentence will evoke a feeling that I just try to make visual.”
For his first solo show in London, Bourgeoisie in Bloom at the Timothy Taylor gallery, opening this month, Titus was inspired by one his favourite movies, Whit Stillman’s 1990 film Metropolitan, which chronicled the antics of a group of upper-class preppies and debutantes on the verge of adulthood in Manhattan. The refined subject matter may seem at odds with his countercultural roots, but for Titus it makes a perverse sort of sense.
After some time spent assisting the artists Raymond Pettibon and Dan Colen, Titus moved from New York to LA aged 27 to focus on his new career, which experienced a rapid ascent during the pandemic. After a debut show at legendary painter Henry Taylor’s studio gallery in January 2020, he had a sellout exhibition at Timothy Taylor in New York last year and his work now features in the private collections of mega-collectors such as Beth Rudin DeWoody and Alexandre Arnault. Inspired by Les Nabis – a group of late 19th-century French artists, including Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, whose paintings emphasise flat surfaces of colour and pattern – there is a wistful, romantic quality to Titus’s work, evocative of a more genteel era. He says: “I see my paintings as an oasis and as a place transcendent of ideas of race and stigma. I want to depict an all-inclusive romance for life.”
In California, Titus is more likely to be listening to jazz and classical music in his studio than the hardcore sounds he grew up with. “LA is a slower speed and it’s calmer – it let me slow down and has given me time to create,” he says. That is, when he’s not out getting photographed at glittery events around town with his fiancée, noted film director Gia Coppola.
But he remains a punk at heart. “Punk rock means doing what you want and being yourself, regardless of what’s expected of you,” he says of his first London exhibition. “For me, to make a show concerning debutante culture right now, this could be seen as a rebellious act. I find great happiness in the idea that I’m doing something that is very much my own.”
Bourgeoisie in Bloom is at Timothy Taylor, W1 from 17 November to 14 January 2023
