Argentinian artist Francisco Díaz Scotto merges worlds real and imagined in his second solo presentation with Hashimoto Contemporary, Where Dreams Touch Ground.

This series of chromatically pungent works highlights the artist’s talent for imbuing his still life and floral paintings with passion and tenderness, pulling from warm memories or familiar environments to create visions of home.

This new series of paintings combines moments from Díaz Scotto’s surroundings with memories or dreams about familiar environments. Textile patterns of oranges, bouquets, or farm animals are broken up by moments of reality, which manifest as an avocado plant sprouting roots in a glass vase or a ñandutí cloth or rug (an intricate type of lace native to Paraguay). The painter’s interest in ornamentation leads him to highlight how “naïve” scenes on blankets, tapestries, wallpapers, or tablecloths can reveal something about a culture and its history. Weaving together textures and subjects of (someone’s) daily life and representing objects that stand in for multiple global territories, the artist expands his influences from the purely personal to a shared visual culture that encompasses the mobile histories of colonialism.

About the exhibition, Díaz Scotto writes that he “takes a step further to show how the archetypes of nature compose diverse cultural traditions, the objects that reflect multiple territories. Throughout the length and breadth of his canvases, the artist revisits a family history shaped by migrations and local displacements. He takes us back to the textures of past daily life that still give a sense of homeyness; to the fabrics wrapping things we remember dearly. His paintings retrieve the stories imprinted or woven into these fabrics, telling them in present tense: the voice that tells the story for another one to dream.

Francisco Díaz Scotto (b. 1986) is a painter and architect from Argentina. Diaz Scotto maintains a dual artistic practice of studio paintings on canvas alongside large scale public murals. His murals, which are related to his conventional architecture background but also serve as a stark departure, stem from the artist's perception of public space work as "urban acupuncture". Most of Diaz Scotto's murals attempt to make light of areas that are usually ignored, some relegated from the irregular and non-inclusive urban designs. These murals begin not simply with a location or facade which operate as a canvas for his painting, but rather serve as an attempt to orient the viewer in creating a dialogue that is respectful of the immediate natural environment. The artist references local flora in both his murals and paintings, flora which he finds growing in the cracks of sidewalks or a facade of a mural's building or around his atelier's neighborhood. The artist believes that the cracks generated by deficient construction processes are a reflection of the human need to control space for a rational and autarkic use and that by taking the small plants that grow within these cracks Diaz Scotto utilizes his work as a mechanism to question modern societal methods and perceptions. In his atelier, Francisco applies these same mechanisms when creating a new body of studio work. Using deeply personal reflection, the artist uses memories and emotions from his past roots as a missionary to create canvas paintings that represent a myriad of home scenes, outdoor jungles, twilight hours and the occasional house dog.