A solo exhibition by Rodrigo Navarro, curated by Amanda Garcia

Online exclusive @ ALA Projects | Opening May 22

Rodrigo Navarro’s work finds its core in the contemplation of impermanence—a fundamental concept in Buddhism that also permeates his artistic practice. From the initial strokes to the final result, his paintings capture fleeting moments and suspend them in time, exploring the ongoing tension between chaos and order.

Rodrigo conceives his pieces as intimate records, where objects and spaces become echoes of daily experience. He chooses to depict inhabited places—his home, his studio, the spaces of friends or family—and fragments of his immediate surroundings, exploring how the spontaneous arrangement of objects tells a story, a series of actions frozen in time. These compositions go beyond mere documentation to reflect on life as a continuous flow of causes and effects.

The idea of the canvas as a container of images informs his technical approach. For Rodrigo, the frame of the painting functions as a window into a delimited space—a representation that resonates with the concept of conditioned existence. In this way, the pictorial format becomes a field where observation and memory, space and time, permanence and transience converge.

In his works, everyday elements—dried plants, empty utensils, resting technological devices, among others—evoke impermanence in its purest form. The arrangement of these objects reflects the apparent disorder of daily life, where each abandoned item suggests an unfinished narrative. The painting becomes a visual metaphor for how time and space intertwine in our lived experience, revealing the profound influence of meditative practice on Rodrigo’s creative process.

His use of pastel tones and expansive planes connects his pieces to an aesthetic reminiscent of Japanese animation and contemporary video games like Fortnite—references that the artist reinterprets to create a unique visual language. This blend of visual influences—from the baroque to the contemporary—constructs a dialogue between the visually concrete and the symbolically ephemeral.

Habitat: Fragments of the Everyday invites the viewer to contemplate the fragility of objects and spaces, recognizing the act of observation as a moment in itself. Through painting, Rodrigo seeks to approach the essence of the transitory, reminding us that both art and life are in constant motion—always in a state of becoming.