Una materia henchida

This painting hung in Miro el sol y no lo reconozco (I Look at the Sun and Don't Recognize It), Mariana Paniagua's solo exhibition at Sala GAM, Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City, from October 2024 to January 2025. Its exhibition text is by Sandra Sánchez, who edits the magazine of Onda MX, which published the text, and describes her own work as "escrituras, perfos y curadurías" (writings, performances and curating). The text opens "Una invocación al movimiento" (An invocation of movement).

Sánchez names "lodos, soles, musgos, humedades, pantanos, estrellas de mar" (muds, suns, mosses, dampness, swamps, starfish) as excesses that unsettle the painted surface "como imagen fija y decodificable" (as a fixed, decodable image). Twice she writes "no un paisaje" (not a landscape), and she ends on "un territorio donde se conjura la vida" (a territory where life is conjured). She calls the paintings "un dispositivo" (a device) announcing "un cambio de paradigma donde lo vivo es irreductible al ojo" (a change of paradigm in which the living cannot be reduced to the eye).

Of how they are made, she writes of "una danza alquímica" (an alchemical dance) that Paniagua performs with time and with the layering of pigments, oils, water and wax, and of "Escuchar lo que va necesitando la pintura, evitar la tentación de anticipar el signo" (listening to what the painting needs, resisting the temptation to anticipate the sign).