Closing Reception: Saturday, October 25, 3–5 pm

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s second exhibition at Commonwealth and Council entitled Cortado includes a new series of paintings on cast rubber as well as a grouping of soft sculpture dolls composed of clothing and stuffed with ceiba tree silken fibers bound to welded steel frames. Cortado is a continuation of the ideas and processes that have been a throughline within Aparicio’s practice for many years: materials and materiality; histories of colonialist expansion; permanence and impermanence; and the experiences of diasporic communities from Central America now rooted in Los Angeles.

An acute attentiveness to the histories of materials and materiality is foundational to Aparicio’s thinking. Working within and throughout the urban landscape of Los Angeles, he uses liquid rubber to produce casts of trees found within the expansive cityscape, resulting in objects that are in between printmaking, sculpture, painting, and installation. Rubber is a material Aparicio turns to again and again for its inherent ability to vividly record indelible details; its connection to the legacies of empire and the western colonialist enterprise and the extraction of natural resources around the world; and also because of its natural properties as a barrier that protects and heals damaged bark on the surface of a rubber tree. Each of Aparicio’s casts capture the exterior features of a particular tree while also yielding more nuanced associations as a form of documentation of the place in which that tree dwells, a fleeting moment in time, and of the communities that live their lives around it. Aparicio’s casts hold all of these details and histories, and as such, care for them.

The casts incorporated within Aparicio’s newest body of work were retrieved from trees on the periphery of Evergreen Cemetery in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles. Now parceled into smaller pieces from the original casts, they assume a new functionality as supports for paintings. In Coyote an image of the iconic animated character, Wile E. Coyote, is split between two casts hung on the wall. Coyote made his first appearance in a Looney Tunes animated short in 1949. The character quickly became known for his clever but ill-fated tricks and endless pursuit of his foe, Road Runner, who always outpaced or outsmarted him. Coyote pictures the Coyote suspended by a trio of balloons, but the painting has been cleaved in two and the Coyote’s head, which is cocked towards his back end, is not attached to the balloons that hold up his rear. His expression is telling, hovering between one of concern and fear. The violence enacted upon the painting, and to Coyote, is a means through which Aparicio addresses the parceling of both bodies and land through war and colonialist expansion, but also, perhaps, to the impossibility of wholeness, both physically and spiritually, experienced by diasporic communities. Wile E. Coyote could be read as a symbol for those who experience liminality, existing within transitional settings that are impermanent.

In another series of paintings entitled Escuadra Blanca (2025), Aparicio draws upon imagery appropriated from a canonical and politically charged series of works by artist Leon Golub. Escuadra Blanca (2025) incorporates four paintings on cast rubber sheets, each of which narrows in on a singular figure within Golub’s The White Squad (1987), a series of lithographic works on paper depicting imagined scenes of government-sponsored violence within Central America. Returning to this period of widespread violence across the region by appropriating a key moment from Golub’s work, Aparicio connects these horrific events from the near past with those happening in the present. Using one color of the four-colored Palestinian flag in each panel further cements the connection Aparicio is trying to make, reminding us, the viewer, that U.S. government-backed violence in other countries is not in the past, but is ongoing.

Dolls comprised of pants, shirts, and hooded sweatshirts are stuffed with the silky floss that grows from the flowers on ceiba trees found throughout Central America, which are strapped together onto a range of welded steel  supports. Here, Aparicio nods to his background in design to create a constellation of sculptural furniture that comprise a quasi seasonal living room collection. Composed of loveseats, a daybed, coffee table, and sofa, these functional objects proffer places for rest. The soft sculpture dolls are an ongoing motif and form for Aparicio who incorporated dolls filled with ceiba floss into a recent multi-part installation in the New Orleans-based triennial, Prospect.6: The Future is Present, The Harbinger is Home. The dolls are intimately connected to Aparicio’s own biography and are a direct reference to dolls that were handmade by Aparicio’s grandmother while she was a refugee in Nicaragua during the Salvadoran Civil War.

Together, this new body of work interweaves ideas and forms that are enduring sites of exploration for Aparicio, including materiality, permanence and impermanence, and cycles of violence connected to the legacies of colonialism locally and within a global context. Drawing upon imagery culled from both popular culture and canonical historical works, opens new possibilities for Aparicio to wage a pointed critique responsive to our pasts and present.

—MacKenzie Stevens

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio (b. 1990, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from Yale University (2016) and a BA from Bard College (2012). Solo exhibitions have been held at Art Omi, Ghent (2025); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023); Los Angeles State Historic Park, Clockshop (2021); Páramo, Guadalajara (2019); The Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2018); and Green Gallery, New Haven (2016). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2025); Prospect.6, New Orleans (2024); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024); The Clark, Williamstown (2023); Denver Art Museum (2022); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2022); Hauser & Wirth, New York (2022); American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2022); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2021); El Museo del Barrio, New York (2021); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2020); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2019); Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City (2018); Smack Mellon, Brooklyn (2017); and Abrons Art Center, New York (2016). Aparicio is a recipient of California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2018) and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016).

Aparicio’s work is in the collections of AltaMed Art Collection, Los Angeles; Denver Art Museum; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.