Through a restrained yet intentional painterly approach, the work of André Marcel Pagán (b. 1984, San Juan, PR) investigates the domesticity of familiar places while simultaneously highlighting and defamiliarizing their specific characteristics. In the works presented in Not the future, quite yet, Marcel Pagán offers a contemporary, everyday vision that verges on dystopian science fiction. His paintings—such as an enlarged third-person view from a Tesla self-driving car, an ironically cheerful portrait of a humanoid robot, and a minimalist depiction of a UFO—serve as a commentary on contemporary alienation through a "utopian" immersion in technology driven by tech giants. These depictions contrast with works that point to a desire for human connection. Interiors of social spaces waiting to be activated, like an empty billiards room and selfies filtered to the point of self-obliteration, are imbued with a haunted longing, a distant remembrance of past lives.

Alienation and distance, both technological and personal, are the unifying principles throughout Marcel Pagán's carefully rendered paintings. These works reference modes of computerized vision and image-making, such as military drones, Tesla Vision systems, and livestream webcam feeds, that dehumanize our notions of viewing by extending the distance between what we see and who and how it's seen. The source images he takes using his phone reference this distance within the image, alluding to a specific kind of millennial loneliness, one that remembers a time before technology and came of age alongside it. There is a kind of reverence created through Marcel Pagán's time spent with each image, bridging the distance felt when living abroad through the intimacy of painting.

André Marcel Pagán is a Puerto Rican artist based in New York whose paintings explore everyday moments, evoking a subtle anticipation and a touch of the absurd. By investigating the intimacy of familiar places, his work highlights the specific and local characteristics of each space. In each image, he focuses on the ambiguity of home and the nostalgia that permeates and surrounds it. Pagán received his BFA in Painting from the School of Plastic Arts of Puerto Rico.