"By casting archival images into surreal, fluorescent oils, Aguilar's paintings recontextualize historical moments and expose their uncanny luridity. While the content of Aguilar's previous work has addressed institutional violence and issues pertaining to social justice, Into the Reflection zooms in. By focusing on a more granular, intimate register, Aguilar's new paintings examine the solitude and aspiration of subjectivity. Working from found photographs-here employed less as historical documents than as archetypal domestic scenes-Aguilar introduces anachronistic elements that collapse past and present."
"In Snared, a staged hunting photograph from decades past is interrupted by a figure absorbed in her phone. The title's double meaning becomes clear: these animals have been caught, but so too has a generation ensnared by new modes of relating to others and themselves. Transfiguration depicts the aforementioned blue-nailed woman in a salon, his face a chaos of clashing colors as he looks between phone and the mirror, caught in an unstable flux between competing ideals and gazes."
Into the Reflection presents new paintings that cast archival images into surreal, fluorescent oils, recontextualizing historical moments and exposing uncanny luridity. The works focus on intimate registers, examining solitude and the aspiration of subjectivity. Found photographs are employed as archetypal domestic scenes and combined with anachronistic elements—a cell phone in a pasture, blue nail polish in a mid-century salon—collapsing past and present. Specific paintings stage moments of generational ensnarement by technology and unstable self-perception in the face of competing ideals and gazes. Settings center on transformation spaces—beauty salons, vanities, private rooms—where mirrors multiply, distort, and unsettle the self.
#surreal-fluorescent-painting #foundarchival-photography #subjectivity-and-self-construction #technology-and-anachronism
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