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Ileana Moreno - Tres altares ígneos
The exhibition brings together a series of recent paintings by Ileana Moreno (Mexico City, 1989) that engage in dialogue with the tradition of the retablo and the altar. Rather than fixed devotional structures, these altars give form to feminine intentions and desires through a visual grammar in which the artist conjures the girly, the angelic, and the monstrous, echoing resources from Japanese manga alongside Mesoamerican figures.
The title, Three Igneous Altars, points to a specific material condition: Ileana incorporates copal resin as part of her materials. Copal, historically linked to ritual practices and ceremonial fire, introduces a living quality into the painting. It does not fully set; it responds to heat, retains sheen and scent, and maintains a certain instability. Copal runs through the paintings as a material memory of combustion and activates a sensory dimension that, beyond sight, engages the body.
From this materiality, the exhibition proposes a rereading of the altar as a space historically traversed by the feminine: a site of care, offering, ritual, and support. With a palette of intense reds and pinks alongside deep blacks, Ileana presents this energy as an active force—one that burns and overflows. Color becomes a thermal register that runs throughout the exhibition.
Fire structures the project as a generative presence. It is in the process, in the intentions, in the way the painting behaves. Within this terrain, feminine figures and hybrid presences emerge not to be venerated as icons, but as unstable apparitions. Swords, hearts, and flowers form an affective iconography tied to gestures of defense, care, and protection. Their bodies unfold complementary energies: delicate and violent, sacred and pop, vulnerable and excessive. Girly is intense, dark, hot, reactive… incandescent.