“I believe a picnic is a utopia,” says Pedro Pedro, whose new solo exhibition at Fundación La Nave Salinas takes its identify from the titular exercise. In Picnic, the Los Angeles-based artist celebrates togetherness, leisure, and small each day luxuries as a method of sustaining steadiness and cheerfulness, even throughout difficult occasions.
Picnic highlights a complete of 15 new canvases. “Beneath their exuberant surfaces lies a subtle homage to the 1950s, through the depiction of mid‐century furniture and aesthetic, a lens through which Pedro critiques the relentless pace of 2025,” the gallery says. “In an age defined by nonstop notifications and doom‐scroll headlines, Pedro invites us back to a time when people savored the present moment.”
Via a tinge of golden age considering, paired with La Nave’s setting in Ibiza, Spain, the place it perches over the Mediterannean, we’re invited to bask in less complicated pleasures like lounging on the seaside and sampling from a seemingly countless array of treats.
Utilizing textile paint on unprimed linen, Pedro begins every work with a digital design, which he then sketches onto the substrate utilizing chalk and fills in with colour. The nearer one research a portray, the extra motifs seem to duplicate, like flawless and practically an identical lilies, dollops of whipped cream, orange slices, or melons.
Similar to his methodology, the connection between how we learn digital and “natural” imagery blurs. Half-peeled citrus, knives deserted in pastries, and random clothes recommend that whoever is having fun with the picnic has maybe simply run off to take a dip within the sea and shall be again any second.
Mirroring the artist’s curiosity in utopia, a great and ideal society, each ingredient of his work is brilliant, juicy, and surreally, nicely, good. He attracts inspiration from the joyously rotund types of Colombian artist Fernando Botero and the Wayne Thiebaud’s decadent pies and desserts.
The present additionally faucets into the ethos of memento mori, which interprets from Latin to “remember you will die.” The idea was particularly in vogue throughout the Dutch Golden Age, showing in nonetheless life work within the type of motifs like wilting flowers and rotting fruit.
For Pedro, it’s not about remembering that life ends; it’s about consciously dwelling it to its fullest. Thus, memento vivere, or “remember to live,” serves as a counterpoint to its weightier cousin. “Each lemon slice, half-eaten tart, or toppled wine glass is not a warning about mortality, but a luminous reminder to inhabit the present with curiosity, joy, and delight,” the gallery says.
Picnic continues via October 31 in Ibiza. Discover extra on the artist’s web site and Instagram.
