In 2024, Scotty Ramon turned 40—and started hunting for something new. As Kid Cudi, he had clocked almost two decades’ worth of alt-rap across a dozen albums, besides building his own fashion line and carving out an acting career. Still, he wanted a new hobby. So, he thought, “Let me just get some canvases and see what happens.”
What happened is now on view at Ruttkowski;68 gallery in Paris, which is hosting Ramon’s first solo painting show, titled “Echoes of the Past.” The canvases here are immediately striking for their clarity and palette—flat backgrounds of pinks, greens, and blues on which the artist’s avatar Max is seen engaging in acts ranging from the violent to the liberating. It’s a deeply personal and clearly cathartic outing.
Scotty Ramon, THROUGH HELL (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Ruttkowski;68.
“Painting became something that was therapy for me,” he told me over the phone, “expressing this side of me in a different way than I do in my music.”
Returning to the Drawing Board
In his music, the rapper has worn his vulnerability on his sleeve, his tracks from “Mr. Rager” to “GHOST!” bottling his struggles with anxiety, depression, and addiction with unflinching candor. “Madness the magnet keeps attracting me,” goes his hit single “Day ‘n’ Nite” from 2008, “I try to run but see I’m not that fast.” Since leaving rehab in 2016, he said last year, “I’ve been a thousand times better.”
But long before he was channeling his inner turmoil into song, Ramon was finding an outlet in visual art. As a kid growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1980s, he harbored dreams of being a cartoonist, drawing characters from Space Jam and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before creating his own comics. His mother supplied him an easel and drawing tools, and enrolled him in art classes. “I was chasing the perfect picture,” he wrote in his 2025 memoir, “finding comfort in the process.”
Scotty Ramon. Photo: Nils Müller.
That impulse to draw was reawakened when Ramon put paintbrush to canvas two years ago, returning to a childhood hobby with adult eyes. His first painting depicts Max, alone against a flat pink plane, taking a knife to his throat, drawing blood—a composition tellingly titled SABOTAGE (2024). He followed that up with THE WATCHER (2024), in which a diminutive Max confronts a large devil face that emerges from a blue field.
With these images, “the idea of what these paintings could be was formulated,” Ramon said. As the exhibition title suggests, they are excavations of the artist’s psyche.
Scotty Ramon, SABOTAGE (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Ruttkowski;68.
Accompanying the visuals is a score that Ramon has composed for the show. Titled “The Worlds of Madness” and produced alongside Ramii, the 10-minute percussive track loops in the gallery space. “When you’re listening to the music and you’re looking at the paintings, you’re going on this ride,” he explained. “I want to bring people into my mind, so they feel like they’re transported to another world.”
Making music and creating visual art, he’s found, emerge from the same creative instinct in him. But where the former calls for far more manpower to put together “a lot of pieces to the puzzle,” painting “is just me and that brush in a room by myself,” he said.
Installation view of “Scotty Ramon: Echoes of the Past” at Ruttowski;68 in Paris. Courtesy of the artist and Ruttowski;68.
In fact, Ramon has taken to his new hobby so avidly that he’s already created 50 to 60 more paintings, enough for his second and third show. He’s also selling merchandise featuring Max, who graces the cover of his memoir, too.
“I feel it just confirms my sensitivity,” he said of his visual art practice. “I can have other ways of expressing myself that feel fresh and new, that are just as powerful as hearing a song.”
Making Meaning of the Darkness
Still, Ramon insisted: “It’s not like I’m painting just to paint.” While the creative process offers its own form of catharsis, he wants the work to resonate more deeply with its viewers, well beyond himself.
“When I paint, it’s me articulating my past struggles, in the hopes that it could help somebody who comes to the exhibition, sees the painting, and gets inspired,” he said.
Scotty Ramon, Versus (2025). Courtesy of the artist and Ruttkowski;68.
In a corner of the gallery stands Versus (2025), a sculptural rendering of his painting SABOTAGE #2 VERSUS (2024), inspired by KAWS’s Companion figures. The fiberglass work sees a grinning, baggy-clothed Max with a knife-wielding form bursting out of his chest. It’s a grim visual illustrating the demons residing in our protagonist—but perhaps also Max’s triumph over this inner being, his fists raised as if poised to do battle.
And in the most uplifting piece in the gallery, FREE (2024) sees Max floating above a cloud-dotted sky. It recalls an image that stuck with Ramon during his childhood, which he described in his memoir as “the astronaut floating out in the sea of stars, seeking to plant his flag where no one else has ever been.” Here, Max beams for a change.
Scotty Ramon, FREE (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Ruttkowski;68.
In spirit, FREE echoes Ramon’s 2025 album of the same name, a pop release that was more buoyant and positive that his previous work. While embraced by his fans, he conceded “it wasn’t this massive thing that took off”—for a reason.
“People are used to hearing me guide them through the dark and I feel like I want to get back to that,” he explained. “And the best way to do it now in a new way is through my paintings. That’s the type of artist I am.”
“Scotty Ramon: Echoes of the Past” is on view January 31–March 1, 2026 at Ruttowski;68, 8 Rue Charlot, Paris, France.