Some of Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s sculptures are suspended from the ceiling or are hanging flat against gallery walls, the scruffy thinness of their sheets of rubber or latex material yielding an impression of flayed carcasses or maybe burial shrouds. Others, fabricated from translucent amber resin that has hardened to a glossy sheen, are low and horizontal, oozing and puddling across the floor like pools of blood or toxic spills. An aura of disaster, death and decay is omnipresent in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen warehouse in Little Tokyo.
But so, surprisingly, is a quality of determined endurance — and even elegance. Aparicio finds beauty amid the ruin. His art engages serious social and political experience, but it succeeds by its refusal to be monolithic.
The show, organized by MOCA’s Anna Katz and Anastasia Kahn, is the first in the revival of the museum’s dormant “Focus” series on emerging artists. (Aparicio was born in 1990 in Los Angeles, where he still works.) Modest in size, it includes fewer than a dozen works made since 2016.
Key to them are the lists of materials dutifully identified in accompanying wall labels. For example: “Cast rubber, with ficus tree surface residues on canvas; glass; twine; and wooden support.” That list accompanies an unkempt, dun-colored polymer sheet, roughly 8 feet tall and 4 feet wide, edged with stitching that holds small green shards of broken glass.
Something’s gone missi.
