ILEANA GARCÍA MAGODA

Somatic awareness, ecological intimacy, and spiritual receptivity guide Magoda’s approach to painting and art making. Her recent paintings translate the sensations of light absorbed through the skin during preparatory sunbaths she takes as a “warm up” prior to working in the studio, part of a practice of healing and treating chronic spinal pain. The heat of the sun, the exertion of sweat, and the rhythm of breath translate into gesture and tempo, forming radiant fields of blooming color.

Magoda’s works are influenced by seasonal cycles, Impressionist studies of light, and spiritual traditions such as Theosophy that regard the artist as medium; they speak to biological process, vision, touch, absorption, and energy. She accepts occurrences of chance marks—made by staining and spreading of material—as equal to intentional brushwork. Although her paintings have long drawn inspiration from plant life and natural environments, it is since her move to Acatitlán, Mexico, in the mountainous countryside, that her tended garden and surrounding landscape have become increasingly personal and central to the work. The tactile intimacy of gardening, with hands pressing into soil to plant, weed, and care for living matter, echoes Magoda’s use of canvas, primed with rabbit skin glue and mixed with inks, whose folds, impressions, and irregularities she associates with the “scars of life.”

From afar, fields of color cohere into luminous atmospheres; at close range, they dissolve into loam and mineral. Her intense palette of hot orange, fuchsia, and acid green registers the sensation of heat on skin, the shimmer of light filtering through foliage, and the cyclical vitality of her garden. Radiant halos of vermilion and pollen-yellow bloom through veils of moss and shadow, as dew kissed grass encases golden discs. Compositional architecture, structured around vertical stalk-like growths, fronds, clusters of blossom heads imply gravity and response to environmental forces such as wind and heat. This oscillation reflects the artist’s observation of the garden through seasonal cycles of flowering, trimming, decay, and regeneration.

Informed by diverse art historical lineages such as spiritualist feminism, medieval visionary imagery, and metaphysical philosophies Magoda’s works resonate with the search for connection between body, environment, and consciousness. Her sensitive use of gold evokes the sacred luminosity of religious iconography and manuscript illumination, where light is rendered as a divine presence, transforming the surface into a field of spiritual radiance. In her works, surface is a record of pressure, mutability, and touch, carrying the marks of care.

Ileana García Magoda (b. 1985, Mexico City) studied Graphic Design at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City. Magoda has exhibited her work internationally at galleries including Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York; Emma Donnersberg Gallery, Paris, FR; Bernheim Gallery, Zurich, CH; Whitewall Projects, Paris, FR; EDJI Gallery, Brussels, BE; and The Black Piglet, Mexico City, MX, among others. Magoda lives and works in Acatitlán, Mexico.