Melania Toma

POROUS BODIES
January 30, 2025

For her first solo exhibition in Mexico City, Italian artist Melania Toma reflects on the interconnectedness of all life forms in the material world. The rise of posthuman philosophies has forced us to reckon with the expanding definition of our bodily boundaries, which has revealed permeability and entanglement as constants. In this new suite of paintings, the artist explores the body as a porous ecosystem that undergoes exchanges to ensure its vitality.

Her canvases echo the underground traces of the ancient city of Teotihuacan, Mexico’s largest civilization built on the basin of Lake Texcoco. Today’s Mexico City preserves traces of its past on the surface as is the case of the building that hosts these paintings. La Casa de la Acequia was a 19th-century control tower—annexed to an earlier complex from the 18th century—that distributed agricultural products delivered straight from the chinampas by a complex network of canals or acequias. The hallways in the interior architecture follow the route of the acequias, and the streets and avenues surrounding the building reveal the path of these old waterways.

The entities in Toma’s paintings are similarly shaped by exterior forces, swelling or secreting other substances while their silhouettes are shaped by the artist’s movements in space. Dark holes from which energies can enter and exit, pulsate and shift are scattered throughout, like visual reminders of our ever-permeable skins. Better to imagine that we are everything that surrounds us, all that circulates in our environment; a lucky evolution of everything that has existed and coexists even in our time.

 
Cindy Peña, curator
Houston, Tx.