Pedro Pedro transforms The Everyday into Vibrant Inanimate Portraits
With dye-like paints on raw linen, Pedro Pedro creates vivid still lifes. He depicts bounties of fruit, large bouquets of flowers in full bloom, piles of clothes, and tables overflowing with art supplies—juxtaposing both tidy and disheveled scenes of abundance throughout his body of work. His captivating paintings have turned up at galleries and art fairs in the United States and Europe, including The Hole in New York and Los Angeles. In early 2022, Pedro booked a solo show with The Hole, where he had previously exhibited on his own and as part of a group, but didn’t anticipate the size of the bicoastal gallery’s new Los Angeles space. “Then, realizing how massive and intimidating the space was, I said, I have to get a studio and figure out a way to actually make all these works,” the L.A.-based artist recalls.
At the time, Pedro painted in his three-hundred-square-foot garage in L.A.’s Atwater neighborhood. He needed to upgrade quickly, just to have space for the raw linen can-vases he ordered. “I was frantically looking on Craigslist for somewhere that’s close to where I live,” he recalls. “I don’t have a car or drive anywhere. I wanted to find a place that I could walk to.” He came across a building in nearby Echo Park and made an offer to pay a year’s rent up front, but wasn’t sure that he would get the space. Then, he ran into the woman who was renting the studio at a restaurant. “We have a quick conversation, and immediately after that I start getting phone calls from my buddies and references in New York,” he says. “The very next day, she calls me and rents me the studio space.” With a new studio space of about twelve-hundred square feet, Pedro was able to begin a body of work that grew quite large. “I wouldn’t have been able to actually fit some of the works in the garage,” he says.
For the show, called “Table, Fruits, Flowers and Cakes”, Pedro made fourteen paintings on raw linen—he had initially aimed to make just twelve—plus nine works on paper. It’s not only a large body of work in terms of the amount of pieces he created, but also in regard to the size of some of the paintings.
I FEEL LIKE EVERYTHING HAS A LITTLE BIT OF A CHARACTER TO IT, EVEN A PIECE OF CAKE OR SOME INANIMATE OBJECT THAT ISN’T LIVING WOULD HAVE SOME LIVING QUALITY TO IT.”
At 72″ x 63”, “Cakes with Watermelon and Éclair” offers more than a mouthful of delights with frosting dripping off an array of cakes, most cut open to reveal their layers, cream oozing from an éclair. Comparable in size is “Plates with Oysters, Lobsters, Fish, Sandwiches, and Charcuterie,” a veritable feast where fruits and olives are squeezed between overflowing plates. As large as some of these canvases are, Pedro manages to fill much of the space with food, flowers, and assorted odds and ends.
“Paint Table with Flowers, Sandwich, Cake and Croc,” is a 92” x 90” still life that brings together the various visual themes of the show. In the painting, the largest from this show, a table is cluttered with art supplies, clothing items, including a Croc shoe, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Adding to this collection of stuff is an assortment of fruit—pomegranate, grapes, and citrus amongst them—a slice of pink frosted cake with a raspberry on top, a small bouquet, and a sandwich layered vegetables, meat, and cheese.
While working on “Table, Fruits, Flowers and Cakes” (which ran at The Hole between February and April of 2023) Pedro debated what he should paint on the largest canvas for the show. Perhaps he would paint a bouquet or maybe a pile of fruit with a bouquet. Then he had a revelation: “Why don’t I do something decadent that all reverts back to the studio process?”
He refers to “Paint Table with Flowers, Sandwich, Cake, and Croc” as the “key” to the show’s imagery. “A lot of the other subjects in the show reflect that table,” he says.
It’s also a return to an earlier series of paintings that Pedro made.
About five years ago, back when he was working out of his garage, Pedro was trying to figure out what he wanted to paint when a neighbor suggested that his table stacked with paints would make a good subject. Pedro liked that idea and, he says, people liked the finished piece. That led to one of the first series of paintings weaving in and out of his body of work over the years that followed. Yet, by the time he was preparing for The Hole show, it had been a year or two since he last painted this type of still life.
“I like to go back and revisit the subjects that I haven’t done in a while to keep it fresh in my head, so that I can feel like I’m coming at it from a new perspective after I’ve worked,” Pedro says. “Say I’ve painted a bunch of bowls of fruit or something for a while. I’ll stop doing that for a minute, go back to something that I’ve done maybe two years ago (subject-wise), and have a new, fresh look at it.”
EVEN A TABLE I FEEL LIKE HAS A LITTLE BIT OF A LIFE FORM.”
Less than a decade ago, Pedro moved from New York to Los Angeles, which made an impact on his art. “Everything in my New York world was crumbling,” he says. “The gallery that I was working with was going under. The studio that I was working in, I was getting kicked out of, but then I was getting this chunk of lawsuit money, so I was like, ‘Okay, why don’t I go to Los Angeles?’.”
In Los Angeles, Pedro thought about the styles in which he had worked earlier in his career as he, “tried to figure out, find out, who I was again.”
“It was a nice, quiet place for me to be. I had this little garage. I had this small, little house,” he recalls. “I was able to not have any external influences on what I was doing, really—for the most part. I was able to experiment a bit and circle back to something that I was doing when I first left New York, but just changing the subject around and just switching a few details in terms of stylistically how I was doing it.”
His more recent studio move to a space that’s about a forty minute walk from his home has resulted in some changes as well, aside from the ability to work on more, larger paintings. “It’s been a little bit different because I’m not just rolling out of my back door into this garage. I now have to walk out into the world,” he says, adding that it helps him get some exercise into the day. “The exercise is me getting to the space. That’s more helpful for me.”
Days in the studio change depending on where in his process Pedro is at the moment. “Today, it would be chalking and printing out the designs that I’m working on for the next piece,” he says.
Other days might be focused on the various stages of painting. “Some days, it’s mulling around, trying to figure out what to do,” he says. “Just a sitting-there-and-staring, smoking-cigarettes kind of day.”
When working with raw linen, Pedro begins with a chalk drawing. From there, he uses Dy-Na-Flow, a fabric paint made by Jacquard. “It gives you a dye effect without having to deal with the dye difficulties,” he says.
Years ago, Pedro worked for a costume painter whose clients included Britney Spears, where he would use dye on silk. “It’s kind of an intense process,” he says.
“I was trying to find some way to get something close to that, using some different materials that were a little bit easier for me to manage,” he explains.
Color is a crucial element in Pedro’s work. In paintings like “Grapes,” “Sunflowers,” and “Pile of Citrus” (all from his most recent show), the colors are bolder than what’s found in nature, yet instantly recognizable. Pedro says that he’s drawn to “almost cartoon-esque” colors that still have an impressionistic quality.
“They interact with each other a lot, so I’m thinking about that a lot whenever I’m working with the paintings, like the subtle difference of a red, a more red-red or purple-red or orange-red or something. I think about those things a lot,” he says. “Right now, I’m thinking about reds because I’m trying to put a bunch of lobsters together without it looking like one big blob of the same colored red.”
He adds that he’s been in this situation before while painting a pile of lemons. “How do you make those lemons bounce off each other? Play with the color a lot so that they push and pull, not just to put things behind it, but also to separate them visually,” he says.
His influences are admittedly “kind of all over the place,” but the Impressionists have made a big impact on how Pedro approaches his art, particularly in terms of his use of color and “some of the distortions” in his paintings. “I’ll typically look at stuff that’s a little bit rougher in terms of how it’s painted,” he says.
He also looks towards emojis and clip art for inspiration. And the world around him plays a part in what he paints, particularly in his most recent show.
WHEN I AM IN MY STUDIO PAINTING, I FEEL LIKE I AM IN THE BEST PLACE I COULD POSSIBLY BE AND DOING THE THING I ENJOY THE MOST.”
“The stuff around me tends to seep into the works a lot,” he says. “Things that I’m looking at will also influence it or anticipation for something that I’m going to do. A lot of times, it’s not necessarily after the fact that I’ve done something. It’s more thinking about it and building it up in my brain. That creates the image more so than me actually experiencing something, in a weird way.”
As for creating the still life compositions, he’s often working from imagination or making collages with clip art and drawings that are representations of what things that surround him and uses that as a point of reference.
Pedro spent much of his twenties painting only figures and surmises that this influenced the still life paintings that he makes today. “I think that influenced all of the things that I’m doing now to give them that strange, lifelike quality to it,” he says.
There are hints of anthropomorphism in Pedro’s paintings, from the puzzled expressions on the face of lobsters and fish in “Plates with Oysters, Lobsters, Fish, Sandwiches and Charcuterie” to the cakes that seem to weep frosting in “Pink Cake with Berries” and “Cakes with Watermelon and Éclair.”
“I wanted to straddle that line as much as possible, where they could be little portraits, or self-portraits even, or just some sort of figurative element that I’m trying to push into the paintings in some way,” Pedro says. “I feel like everything has a little bit of a character to it, even a piece of cake or some inanimate object that isn’t living would have some living quality to it that I try to breathe life into every piece that I put in there,” he says. “Even a table, I feel like, has a little bit of a life form.”
You can see those signs of life in “Paint Table with Flowers, Sandwich, Cake and Croc,” from the clothes strewn across the table, wrinkled as if they are in motion, to the tomato and cheese protruding from in between slices of bread, as if the sandwich were sticking out its tongue.
“A lot of them, for me, like the table piece, will turn into a big portrait to me sometimes, even though it’s just a table,” he says. “I try to straddle that line: ‘Oh, this is a big portrait, or it’s just a table.’ I don’t know. It could be both.”
*This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 67, which is available here!
Germany-born artist Kati Heck crafts absorbing oil and watercolor paintings that use varying sources, whether literary or living models. At times, these surreal scenes utilize abstracted backdrops, at times adorned with text reminiscent of advertisements. Heck was last mentioned on HiFructose.com here.
The massive, frenetic scenes painted by Fredrik Söderberg pull from mythology and art history. Using watercolors and taking notes from cultures across the globe, he uses a knack for lush environments to pull together otherwise disparate elements. Works such as "Krigarens väg / The Warrior's Path" (below), blend the gruesome with the elegant.
The whimsical, surreal oil paintings of Thomas Ascott use the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee as a backdrop, where the artist himself was raised. This creates a highly personal aspect to these works, part of a new show at Arch Enemy Arts titled “The Astral Woods.”
In the way a funhouse mirror warps the mundane into the absurd, Brazilian artist Rafael Silveira combines innocuous imagery with the vaguely grotesque to provide a disorienting sensory experience not unlike that of a carnival, where the cheery morphs in and out of the eerie until they are no longer distinguishable.