Simchowitz is pleased to present Beneath the Avocado Tree, a solo exhibition by Ken Taylor Regnaga, on view at Hill House Pasadena. An open house and reception will take place on Sunday, May 3, from 11am–3pm. RSVP for address and parking information here.
There is a particular kind of shade, soft and irregular, shifting with the wind, where time slows just enough to notice what usually slips by. Beneath an Avocado Tree begins in that space.
In this exhibition, Taylor Reynaga approaches the landscape not as distant scenery but as something inhabited, labored in, and carried physically. Fields, mountains, and domestic interiors unfold in saturated color and restless line, shaped less by direct observation than by recollection, by the sensation of being inside a place that has already taken hold of you. The paintings resist stillness. They move between figuration and abstraction, between presence and erasure, as if the image itself were struggling to retain what cannot be fixed.
At the core of these works are those whose labor sustains daily life, figures largely unacknowledged. Forms appear and recede, elongated, fragmented, or partially absorbed into their surroundings. Cowboys, workers, and caretakers move through the terrain, their bodies bending toward it, merging with it, until the boundary between figure and ground dissolves. A hat becomes a hill. A body becomes a shadow. The land holds their imprint, even when it does not name them.
“I think of the people,” the artist reflects. “The people who take care of our landscape. My people. The ones who clean our homes, fix our cars, grow and harvest our food, build our houses, repair our plumbing, hang our lights, and cook our meals. Beneath this tree, I think about how they remain unseen. How we’ve lived invisible within the land we cultivate, to the point that we’ve become part of it.”
Born in Lynwood and raised in California’s Central Valley, Taylor Reynaga brings layered histories of migration, labor, and inheritance to his practice. His work moves fluidly between worlds without seeking resolution, drawing on art history, popular culture, and lived experience to construct images that feel both specific and quietly mythic. Influences surface and recede; gestures recall Nueva Figuración and Nueva Presencia; colors are drawn from the Valley’s heat; forms hover between the familiar and the unfamiliar.
There is tenderness here, though not a gentle kind. It is shaped by endurance and the capacity to hold beauty and exhaustion simultaneously. Moments of respite sit alongside scenes of work, tables linger after meals, and mountains press forward, almost uncomfortably close. What first appears idyllic begins to shift, revealing something more unsettled beneath the surface.
This body of work extends Reynaga’s ongoing exploration of figuration situated between abstraction and representation. His surfaces, layered, irregular, and at times deliberately unresolved, reflect the complexity of the histories they embody.