Wiley World: His Paintings Might Resemble Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds or Thomas Gainsborough, but Little Else Is Traditional about Kehinde Wiley's Approach to Urban Male Culture

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Kehinde Wiley doesn't need to know how to work a room. During the April opening of his exhibition "The World Stage: Brazil" at the Roberts & Tilton gallery in Culver City, Calif., the 32-year-old artist known for his portraits rendering men of color as nobles, saints, and the subjects of colonial statues managed to get just a few feet inside the door. Old friends swooped in to hug the Los Angeles native, and strangers slipped cards into the jacket pocket of the beige linen suit he wore with a turquoise T-shirt and no-lace Converse sneaks. As Wiley stood amid his arrestingly larger-than-life photo-realist portraits of young men from the impoverished favelas of Rio, the room came to him.

So it should. Wiley is perhaps the model of a 21st-century international pop-culture star. He's an ambassador of often opposing worlds, doing work that pumps the pulse of contemporary street life into the hallowed halls of classical fine art. Based in Brooklyn, N.Y., he lives a nomadic existence, painting in studios around the world and hanging with musicians-his boyfriend is a Beijing DJ who goes by the name of Marco, and Wiley is chummy with Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner of Fischerspooner as well as the Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A. "Artists are honorary famous people," he demurs. "We get to meet a lot of celebrities." Denzel Washington and Elton John own his work, which is currently …