Occasionally a gallery delivers a show of work that activates the intellect, rewards an afternoon of driving, and restores a little hope. In the small gallery at François Ghebaly are Patricia Iglesias Peco’s large works on paper. Flowers rendered in understated transparent oils generously fill the paper spaces of the frames without crowding them. Sensually painted in a rich, muted palette and wandering, inventive brush strokes, the paintings exude a casual mastery of an old art history standby in a fresh new style. The exhibition text includes quotes from Bataille about the flower’s death drama between earth and sky, and reflections on the erotic suggestiveness of the stamen serve to clarify Iglesias Peco’s inspiration and intentions. 

Entering the main gallery, Paulo Nimer Pjota’s installation is a jarring arrival into a very different world. Heads and masks with hybrid grins or grimaces—derived from both ancient and pop culture—are tethered to the floor, to paintings and to grinning bronze ashtrays filled with butts. The paintings directly reference walls in the streets of São Paulo and are explosively stylus-scratched—the marks sparking and scattering like fireworks. Cutouts stylized as ancient vases floating on colored panels hint at previous empires. Stickers and logos are placed here and there throughout the works along with orange and black pumpkins, black-toned bronze cannonballs, bronze masks and cherries. 

Paulo Nimer Pjota, EX VOTO, 2022. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly Los Angeles.

Altogether, this is a visual vocabulary in a field of signs that don’t add up until you accept that the colored ‘street wall’ panels (distressed tempera paintings) have been ‘tagged’ with disparate references. In Ballet Triadico amarela (2022), an elongated mask and red ball from Oscar Schlemmer’s incredible Bauhaus Ballet (early rebellious modernism) hover on a scarred yellow wall above an antique vase (culture and empire). In the adjacent panel, a cherry X (the cherries that come with luck at the slot machine), and below on the floor, four black-colored bronze cannonballs (empire and defeat). Elsewhere in the room there are mysterious logos, a lone cactus and some LA Dodger stickers. 

Okay, maybe it still doesn’t all quite add up, but the way it doesn’t add up is charged with a palpable, tactile authenticity. There is chemistry here. Maybe the empire will, after all, break like a vase.