Loyal is proud to present the second edition of our annual exhibition at the historic El Royale in Hancock Park, Los Angeles. We are honored to present Devendra Banhart, Michelle Blade, Zoé Blue M., Madeleine Bialke, Anna Camner, Emmanuel Louisnord Desir, rafa esparza, Sharif Farrag, Henry Gunderson, Lizette Hernández, Jin Jeong, Chanel Khoury, Hannah Lupton Reinhard, Jean Nagai, Ryan Preciado, Devin Reynolds, Alake Shilling, Sonya Sombreuil, Constance Tenvik, Aryo Toh Djojo, and Tianyue Zhong in the hallowed halls of this Los Angeles historic landmark.

El Royale glided into the City of Angels in 1929 with a grand design, name and aim with its Spanish Revival, French Rococo and Renaissance styles. The building was designed by William Douglas Lee, the architect of the famed Chateau Marmont, completed the same year. Situated between Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and Downtown, legends from LA’s Roaring Twenties graced El Royale and called it home. We can imagine these performers, writers, and the tip-tap of heels on the marble floors, soft clouds of smoke swirling in the glow of the ornate candelabras of El Royale.

This year’s exhibition brings together twenty-one artists in the building’s grand, ground floor parlor. Together their works form an abstracted visual language of color and form, landscape, figure, and technology, allowing us to perceive the classic warmth of the parlor through the optics of now. Viewed in this haunting environment history feels more tangible with a sense of meeting the moment.

Michelle Blade’s desert-scape painting depicts a figure climbing under a celestial night sky, and Zoé Blue M.’s mirror-portrait sprinkled in shining rivulets of blue water droplets, both seem to inhabit multiple time periods at once. Hannah Lupton Reinhard’s crystal-coded painting of a female figure gazes upwards brightly and is soaked in pattern and color which conjure multi-dimensional legacies. Also fusing the present, past, and future, Chanel Khoury’s oil painting of an ethereal twilight, in a godlike world beyond this reality, and Devin Reynolds’ vibratory portal painting open visual pathways which give a fluid sense of time, wave, and structure. In Aryo Toh Djojo’s airbrush painting, a car rolls quietly down a dark street as an otherworldly, atmospheric light looms in the sky harkening to another time and place.

All the while the iconic pistachio green neon sign sits proudly atop El Royale’s 13 floors, shining through the ‘medieval apricot glow’ of LA’s winter sky. This exhibition celebrates the connective draw visual opulence elicits no matter the era and the ever glimmering pulse that was and is LA.