Born Los Angeles, California

In 2005, Robert Vargas stepped back from a wildly successful career as the talent buyer for the renowned world music venue the Conga Room to return to oil bars, charcoal, canvas and the figure. The artist, purchased his new loft in the historic core of Downtown Los Angeles one mile from where he was born, resurrected the career he started at the age of three.

Popularly recognized for bringing fine art to the street, quite literally, by painting outside on the sidewalks during Downtown’s monthly art walk, the artist has become something of a celebrity. Each month the loyal crowd watching him grows. His current trajectory is a continuation of one he has been building since early teens. At 17 his work became part of the permanent collection of the Western Heritage Museum, already completing two murals for them, and by 18, had another permanent mural at the Edmund D. Edelman Children’s Court while also showing at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles. He attended the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and received a full scholarship to Pratt Institute in New York City. Since 2006, Vargas has work exhibited every month, from Beverly Hills to Boyle Heights. Often, he paints live, notably at Downtown L.A. Art Walk, at Edgar Varela Fine Art, the Regent, charity events, and more.

Accolades aside, the power of his work speaks for itself with Vargas’ bold use of his media, mastery of classical techniques, and the explosion of familiar paths in favor of the unknown. Vargas’ work reaches beyond boundary-thwarting figurative representations. He chronicles the guttural and ethereal experience of what it means to love and live in our age. In style and content, he makes a plea for a kinder, gentler world.

In style, one sees erratic and ecstatic strokes; sculptural application of bold, vibrant color; and sometimes the abandonment of brushes, using oil bars. His finished product has a lyrical beauty that is at times grotesque and well informed (Francis Bacon and Ralph Steadman come inevitably to mind). Like those artists, he works fast—watching him, you get the sense that he would like to spout oil paint from his fingertips so the distance between his brain and his canvas would be shorter. In his figurative subjects, Vargas favors extraordinary bodies with uncommon flesh, his two favorite models being an 80-year old model (the first he drew in high school and who still models for him today) and a former-ballerina with swelling curves. Always drawing out from the subject what is hidden within, portraiture also figures strongly in his work, both when he paints live and in a project to capture the people who constitute the fabric of his time and place, including Chicano artist Gronk and L.A. muralist Ken Twitchell. A first-rate flaneur with a keen sense of the streets, his life in downtown creeps into sobering narratives of homelessness, drug abuse, and hopes that vicious circles will stop inscribing themselves.

Vargas has a heritage and history that intrigue on par with his work. His blood is Native American and Mexican Indian, formative aspects of his identity, but these are not boxes he fits into professionally. His life as an artist is forged not from privilege, but is manifested through the sheer will to do this and only this. If his work has movement and watching him paint is like a performance, it could be that his years break dancing, ballroom dancing, you name it, are creeping to the surface. When seeing his interior design work, often reflecting his passion for antiques, it becomes clear that Vargas sees the world as a canvas and living as an art.