Mariana Paniagua builds an inner universe to contemplate painting and our own mortality. Small reticular compositions are sewn together before painting begins, frames within frames, bodies with organs.

Inspired by comics and religious polyptychs from art history, the paintings and their fragments evoke movement and metamorphosis as found in wounds. Maps-landscapes, histories of tombs, mastabas, and holy catacombs inhabited by ancient and phantasmagoric presences––structures whose forms derive from painting’s own force. Diagrams and symbols conform to some kind of unwritten calligraphy, not on a surface, but incrusted into flesh: pictorial and geological stratifications, condensations between oil and solvent, the death of flowers, drippings as erosion from the passing of time, drought, accumulations, the loss of entities. Stars.

Paniagua considers the Mayan Reina Roja and the deadly strength of the red cinnabar that coated her remains. The use of color-matter on these paintings allows for the gestation of a luminous putrefaction and an underground ignition, heavy like iron. Light appears as fire from the underworld, and as a possible genesis that interacts with the dark firmness of matter. Mud color as a light shutter, red, inner cauldrons.

Certain paintings possess a protective osseous light, membranous as a thick caress. Paniagua paints an origin of life connected to detritus and the accumulation of layers. From egg to cosmogenesis,scales range from micro to macro, vanishing the exclusive relationship of the interior-exterior. Each cave has a small opening where light enters through; a crack. Each open space is a crypt or inner matrix.

Lucia Vidales, Fall, 2026