Pablo Rasgado:
Time-Based

From May 1, 2022

By Gabriela Urtiaga, MOLAA Chief Curator

Time-Based is the first solo exhibition in a California museum for the young Mexican artist Pablo Rasgado. For this unique occasion, the primary theme of this creative setting is connected to a significant and recurrent link across his artistic production: the passage of time in connection to the landscape, urban or natural, where he experiments and investigates the immanent changes that objects possess, based on form, function, and historical symbology.

Through his interest in deciphering urban artifacts and the encapsulated content that identifies them, the artist patiently classifies and saves each of the objects and materials that he has encountered during his travels around the world, to later transition them into potent architectural elements and into permanent vestiges of a materiality found in his abstract paintings, sculptures, and installations, generating a transfiguration of the commonplace, the occupied space, and space that is manipulated in the porous process of becoming.

Pablo Rasgado’s work needs and depends on time. Time which operates in the fragments of found pieces, time which operates in the interaction between idea and final work. This also describes the viewer’s own time, which measures the incremental process through which the artwork reveals itself, allowing the viewer to rediscover certain anthropological aspects that the artist works to highlight in a creative field of action.

In Time-Based, the works experience and express their own cycle. They demonstrate their seemingly irreconcilable transience and permanence in the traces of extracted and manipulated remains, and throughout the course of their exhibition will take different forms in the room with the participation of the public, generating new bifurcations of an imagined future.

As if in a labyrinth in constant reworking, we are witnesses to a present time that branches into parallel times, creating contemporary universes open to all the possibilities of the artist’s vast production, where he subtly recreates unfolded structures that transcend the formal borders of painting. Thus, he creates a constellation of conceptual graphs that contain collective and imagined stories.

Sponsors:

Support for the Pablo Rasgado: Time-Based exhibition provided by JoAnn Busuttil, Hedy Fischer & Randy Shull, and Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles. In-Kind support provided by The Westin Long Beach.