Scott Carrillo Azevedo: The American Home

LOS ANGELES, LA | albertz benda introduces the work of Scott Carrillo Azevedo to a Los Angeles audience. The American Home, curated by Kathy Battista, is a solo exhibition of powerful new works by the artist, who is based in New Haven, CT.

Carrillo Azevedo paints enigmatic and ethereal scenes of people and places in oil on canvas, linen, and board. Most of the paintings in this series are set in domestic spaces, as pictured in the vintage American interior design magazines that the artist collects. The paintings first appear as typical images from the ideal family: a woman wearing a blue dress in a glamorous living room in Everybody’s Mad About Pink; a child playing the piano, encouraged by an adult in The Piano Lesson; two children with his grandmother standing outside their home in Pillars of Sand. The artist’s choice of exuberant color palette and his subject matter give viewers a sense of the loving comforts of an ideal home, reminiscent of early 20th century canvases by Mary Cassatt or Berthe Morisot.

The iconic 1960s modernist Californian architecture of Albertz Benda becomes the ideal setting for this body of work in which the artist creates newly imagined spaces for American families, such as his own, that are relegated to the margins of society. The home is a contentious space for Carrillo Azevedo and his work is inspired by a turbulent family history that dates back generations, from his grandparents being redlined from owning property in 1950s Los Angeles to his father being orphaned at seventeen. In addition to enduring the untimely loss of two siblings and an uncle who was his namesake, the artist has struggled as a queer person who wanted to live an openly gay life, ejected from his family home as a teenager and ultimately experiencing a decade of homelessness. It took him twenty years to complete his education, recently graduating in 2022 and embarking on a full-time art career. Throughout two decades that he struggled with personal issues, his dream of becoming an artist was his North Star.

Underlying the canvases in The American Home is the artist’s abiding need to find acceptance: the empty bed in Husband and Husband hints as the erasure of the queer experience from mainstream media and culture yet remains hopeful for a new era of equal rights. Pink Sombrero is a celebratory nod to the artist’s Mexican heritage and shows a shirtless man wearing a large pink sombrero. This painting plays with ideas of machismo Latin American culture, while its ornately shaped structure reminds that identities are often multivalent and complex, where indigenous and European culture coalesce. Indeed, Carrillo Azevedo is a paradigm of intersectionality: not accepted by either white or Mexican culture for his queerness. Indeed, his mother’s deracination of his Mexican ethnicity (as a child he was told he was Italian) led to many years of trauma and confusion about his identity. Like other LGBTQ+ youths in the US, the artist struggled to find a safe and supportive home. His paintings reimagine domestic spaces where harmony and love prevail.