“I think of the people. The people who take care of our landscape. My people,” Ken Taylor Reynaga said on the occasion of his new solo show, Beneath the Avocardo Tree, on view at Hill House in Pasadena this summer. “Beneath this tree, I think about how they remain unseen. How we’ve lived invisible within the land we cultivate, to the point that we’ve become part of it.”
On a cool Sunday morning a few weeks back, I went to Hill House to see the opening of Reynaga’s new works, with the unique setting of a part residence, part residency, work placed in-situ with a home setting. It felt like a unique way to see the works, placing the landscapes and overhead views of people and their movements surrounded by living spaces. You get the idea of what Reynaga was going for, this idea of integrating the unseen into a domestic setting. The labor and the work it takes to hold up a community, a society, a world.
There is an organic way that he paints. Colors could seem abstract but as you step back they reveal shapes and figuration. Dense works on paper feel loose. There was something the gallery noted that I found quite beautiful in that what “first appears idyllic begins to shift, revealing something more unsettled beneath the surface.” And perhaps you wouldn’t get this in a gallery setting. Perhaps you need to see these shifts and this misunderstood infrastructure of life in a luxurious and quiet home setting. There was sounds coming from the vinyl records and the sound systems throughout the property, but the loudest noice came from the paintings themselves, teeming with life. —Evan Pricco
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