CHARLIE SALAS-HUMARA // Billboards

On view January 9–February 15, 2026
Opening reception Saturday, January 10 (2–4pm)

Nationale is pleased to start the new year with a bang and announce Billboards, Portland-based artist Charlie Salas-Humara’s fourth exhibition with the gallery. This collection of new abstracted works on canvas advances the artist’s uniquely minimalist and fragmented style, favoring bold swaths of color, abbreviated text, and blurred figuration. Neon pigments and dark, heavy marks replace earlier works of a lighter touch. The title of this show pays homage to this differing technique recalling the faded, collage aesthetics of dilapidated billboards that dot endless stretches of rural and urban roadsides. Salas-Humara draws from the visual language of these iconic landmarks as well as weathered walls and surfaces, each meant to once sell, instruct, or guide but are now eroded by time and graffiti. As paint peels and paper buckles, meaning becomes fractured over time. 

As such, these canvases too explore the separation of symbol from its inherent intimation. Where billboards might represent bygone authority and faded commerce, what might a work of art intone to its audience? Both visual displays are similar in their shape and function—commanding in stature, and with a desire to evoke the attention of impressionable passersby. The billboard and the painting equally transcend cultural borders as easily recognizable icons. Referencing his Cuban heritage, Salas-Humara recognizes the decaying billboard as a metaphor for what once was the hopeful status of promise and progress now marked by interruption and revision. History, displacement, and memory live through obfuscated and damaged layers whose stains and tears are marks of resistance rather than submission. These signposts document an enduring survival and defiance much in the same way that the artist’s painted renditions work to rewrite and reclaim the very same narrative. Billboards is an eager exploration of the artist's identity and collective unconscious memories within a larger lived experience. 

Charlie Salas-Humara is a painter and musician living in Portland, OR. Self-taught, he began working with acrylic, oil, charcoal, and collage as a means of expressing his love of dance and music through art. Salas-Humara has toured extensively in the United States, Europe, Russia, and China (with The Planet The and under the moniker of Panther), and has shown his visual work in Portland, OR, Springfield, OR, Los Angeles, and New York.

For a Collectors’ Preview, please fill in the form below and we will send it later this week. Thank you :)