Lorenzo De Los Angeles’ Victorian pastel still lives hide their subversive nature behind soothing muted colors and exquisitely intricate rendering. Their surface beauty is subtly underscored by the sometimes macabre and explicit imagery that they contain. These small altars or palace gardens, infiltrated by allusions to peripheral cultures and fetishes: clothespins on nipple-like forms, crack pipes and the hallucinogenic toad bufo alvarius, create psychedelic paradises whose understated elegance makes their strangeness palatable. De Los Angeles pilfers from botanical illustrations, images from his father’s medical and pharmacological books that he looked through as a child, photography and cinema to construct elaborate narratives for the viewer to excavate. The obsessive nature in which the images are executed in these composites lend the subjects the importance of artifacts endowed with ritual and alchemistic powers. His references to ancient civilizations and customs, as well as allusions to phantasmagorias, mythology and the paranormal contextualize the memento-like quality of the subjects and explain the psychological richness of his botanical wonderlands and vaudeville magic hat shows.