When Francisco Díaz Scotto went by the moniker PASTEL and was painting massive murals, he did it with a sensitvity of a still-life painter. And yet there was something quite physical to the work, a mining of memory and the strength of a place, a deep understanding of the places we leave behind. His paintings do the same. They are still-lifes that move. Scotto is about to open Where Dreams Touch Ground, the Argentinian painters new solo show at Hashimoto Contemporary in LA. And he's working with memory and dreams once again.
This new series of paintings combines moments from Díaz Scotto’s surroundings with memories or dreams about familiar environments. Textile patterns of oranges, bouquets, or farm animals are broken up by moments of reality, which manifest as an avocado plant sprouting roots in a glass vase or a ñandutí cloth or rug (an intricate type of lace native to Paraguay). The painter’s interest in ornamentation leads him to highlight how “naïve” scenes on blankets, tapestries, wallpapers, or tablecloths can reveal something about a culture and its history. Weaving together textures and subjects of (someone’s) daily life and representing objects that stand in for multiple global territories, the artist expands his influences from the purely personal to a shared visual culture that encompasses the mobile histories of colonialism.
