Pedro Covo exhibition: 'El ritual de lo habitual (The Ritual of the Habitual)'

SCAD presents El ritual de lo habitual (The Ritual of the Habitual), a thesis exhibition by Pedro Covo (M.F.A. painting). In this exhibition, Covo offers a series of paintings that depict his grandmother, Gladys, and the repeated actions and gestures she experiences every day since her husband died, when she moved to the second floor of her opulent house, never to leave again. His deeply personal images magnify the mundane, the banal, and the repetitive to reveal deeper truths about the human experience.

Covo’s work evokes a world he remembers from his upbringing. For 20 years, his grandmother has cycled through the same actions in her house on the Caribbean coast of Colombia: from a tranquil breakfast to sewing, then lunch and a siesta, followed by TV and an evening pause on the balcony when the sun is falling and the breeze starts to cool the otherwise inclement heat of Cartagena de Indias. This is the ritual of the habitual, an everyday routine Covo’s grandmother developed years ago. In his depiction of Gladys in these habitual gestures, Covo seeks to express the essence of human experience, which, for the artist, lies not in peak events but rather in the unconscious flow of little things, and the sum of those hours creates a synergy that is as important as it is eternal.

About Pedro Covo
Pedro Covo was born in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, in 1988, and graduated from the Javeriana University of Bogota with a degree in visual arts in 2011. In 2013, he created an online visual essay course at schoolism Canada. Covo has worked for several magazines and companies since 2008 in Colombia and abroad, including EuroDisney, Der Spiegel, TV Channel Historia in Quebec, Detroit Business, Reveu Long Course, Semana, El Tiempo, and others.