From Punk Band to Portraits for a King

“Men’s suits were better made in 1940 than they are now. I want to know the cut. I want to know where the tweed came from. I like those details.”

On a California clear day, the artist Honor Titus was sitting on a sofa in his spare industrial studio, talking about the paintings that will be on view in his first show with Gagosian’s Beverly Hills gallery starting July 20.

Lanky and elegant at almost 6-foot-4, Titus, who turns 34 on Tuesday, seems born into the wrong century. He loves tailored clothes, “The Great Gatsby,” classic jazz and old movies. He views “with romance” the days when bus tokens had holes and he had to call on the land line to reach his friend Philip. The subjects of his paintings swing rackets in tennis whites, slow dance in full skirts, play the horn in fedoras.

At the same time Titus is very much a product of his own generation, having grown up as the son of Andres “Dres” Vargas Titus, a member of the seminal rap group Black Sheep (of the 1991 hit, “The Choice Is Yours”), and formed his own successful punk band, Cerebral Ballzy, in 2008.

Both worlds inform his paintings, which he only started showing in 2020, when the artist Henry Taylor gave him a solo show, at Taylor’s former Chinatown studio in Los Angeles, despite Titus’s lack of any formal training.

“He was somebody really focused,” Taylor said. “You don’t always have to go to Yale.”

The ensuing three years saw Titus take off, with his work featured in a group show at Karma gallery in New York as well as in solo shows in New York and London at Timothy Taylor, who started representing him in 2021.

“The paintings seemed to evolve with a sense of confidence,” Timothy Taylor said. “I like both his ambition and his humility.”