Los Angeles-based artist Pedro Pedro specializes in capturing the playful anxiety of our everyday milieu. His still life paintings include fruit bowls, lavish spreads of food or clothes chaotically strewn about. While everything exists in bold color, Pedro’s imagery remains soft in texture from applying textile paint onto unprimed linen.

While his 2021 exhibition Cantaloupe and Kokomo at The Hole in Tribeca specifically drew attention to the contiguity of our daily virtues and vices, Pedro's use of his signature imagery in his most recent solo exhibition, 2023's Table, Fruits, Flowers and Cakes at our Los Angeles location, created indulgent and delicious paintings awaiting consumption. While the paintings are bountiful—charcuterie and cheese, stacks of seafood, soft and sugary cakes, citrus stacked to the ceiling—there is a lingering restraint, with just a slice or two taken from each.

In Pedro’s painted universe, wholesomeness coexists with disquiet tension. This tension is underscored by the artist’s skewed perspective and flat planes, upon which all objects sit as if ready to fall off the canvas. Most important to Pedro’s practice however, is his intuition, drafted from a collage of images, his scenes come together as he goes along, allowing his inner thoughts to shine through, while also leaving space for our own.