ERICA MAHINAY

The exhibition rests on two distinct yet inseparable pillars. The first comprises a substantial new body of paintings in which Mahinay continues to develop her rigorously intuitive practice. These canvases resist easy categorisation. They are abstract, yet they bear the unmistakable pressure of a body at work. Paint is applied in a variety of ways, but most strikingly by hand, literally: the artist’s fingers become instruments of both structure and sensation, leaving traces that are at once gestural and deliberate. There is something almost symphonic in the accumulation of these marks, a lyrical drawing-out of form that unfolds across the surface with the logic of a score rather than a plan.

And yet these works are not lawless. Beneath their apparent freedom lies a grid-like sensibility, a latent architecture that organises without constraining, that gives the eye somewhere to move without telling it where to go. One senses that the grid is never imposed but rather discovered, as though it were already sleeping inside the canvas, waiting to be woken by colour and pressure. Colours, here, are never incidental. Each canvas asserts a chromatic identity that feels both chosen and inevitable, contributing to a body of work marked by striking diversity and, simultaneously, by a deeply coherent visual voice, one that is instantly recognisable across even the widest variation of surface or palette.

The second pillar emerged from Mahinay’s residency at Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2025. The ceramic installations produced there occupies an entirely different register, though the resonances with the paintings are immediate and intuited. Fingerprints recur, and the directness of touch remains central but where the canvases lean fully into abstraction, the ceramic works flirt openly with the figurative. Human forms surface and recede.

Shapes carry the weight of archaeological memory, as though unearthed rather than made, bearing the marks of time and ritual alongside those of the artist’s own hands. Clay, unlike canvas, holds everything: pressure, hesitation, revision. In Mahinay’s hands it becomes a material of quiet testimony, registering the body’s presence with an intimacy that feels at once ancient and entirely contemporary.

The exhibition’s title, Evaporation Ceremony, encapsulates this dialogue. It suggests a rite of transformation, where the liquid immediacy of paint and the solidity of clay meet, and where the figurative solid can dissipate into the abstract ether. It speaks to a process of becoming, where a symphony of colour and gesture is both laid bare and obscured, like a memory or a landscape fading in the heat, or conversely, condensing from vapour into form.

Following her presentation in Brussels, Mahinay will continue her inquiry this summer at the Headlands Center for the Arts in California. There, against the threshold of ocean and sky, the work will encounter new conditions for evaporation.