Cynthia Gutiérrez
Desafíos (El mismo lugar, pero otro lugar), 2025
Plastic letters
Opening May 8, 2025
PROXYCO Gallery, 88 Eldridge Street, New York, NY 10002
El mismo lugar, pero otro lugar conjures a paradox of perception and an invitation into feminist fabulation: how a site, a memory, a body, a presence, or a form may appear familiar yet remain radically transformed and unruly, alive with latent potential. This group exhibition gathers works by Julieta Beltrán, Adela Goldbard, Cynthia Gutiérrez, Diana Sofia Lozano, Stephanie Lucchese, Daniela Ramírez, Chaveli Sifre, and Lucía Vidales, in dialogue with a selection of sketches by Remedios Varo, to reflect on ideas of dislocation, mutation, rupture, and reinvention across material, political, and metaphysical terrains.
The participating artists share an affinity for speculative visual languages—ranging from surrealist methodologies to ritualistic assemblage, narrative distortion, and political storytelling. Through their varied practices, they reimagine the porous borders between natural worlds, the sacred and the profane, and the mythic and the historical. As a whole, the selection of works traces the contours of a feminist imaginary—one that reclaims intuition, dream, desire, and magic as bountiful modes of world-building.
Several works trace a return to the body—not as a fixed vessel, but as a haunted, hybrid, and resisting entity. From Chaveli Sifre’s alchemical transmutations of symbols into spiritual revolt, to Julieta Beltrán’s corporeal narratives of self-construction and personal memory, the body becomes a site of both wound and wonder. In dialogue with these explorations, Lucía Vidales’ painting stages a decomposing figure in lurid, melancholic ecologies, where pleasure and decay intermingle in a dance of tragic beauty: undone yet luminous, tragic yet alive.
Other works in the exhibition foreground ecological, cosmic, and mystic concerns. Daniela Ramírez invokes the psychedelic properties of the ololiúqui flower to map cosmic interrelations between the plant, celestial bodies, and the spirit. Diana Sofia Lozano’s mutant flora camouflage themselves from imperial sight, invoking the insurgent intelligence of plants. Adela Goldbard’s pyrotechnic works ignite the volcanic and the revolutionary, linking traditional craft with histories of resistance in Mexico, transforming pyrotechnics into both an archival practice and a pledge for a more sustainable future.
Cynthia Gutiérrez’s subtle but powerful interventions offer a poetics of ruin and reconstruction. Meanwhile, Stephanie Lucchese conjures strange gardens of delight—sensuous tableaux where lush bodies and edible forms spiral through theatrical fictions, and desire curdles into a portal to an uncanny world of her own making.
Threaded throughout the exhibition, the presence of Remedios Varo—whose work seamlessly merged science, magic, and the subconscious—serves as a spectral companion. Her drawings provide a generative reference point, illuminating how artistic experimentation can conjure alternate cosmologies and feminist futures.
Together, the works in El mismo lugar, pero otro lugar create a visual grammar that unsettles linear narratives and opens portals into spaces where memory mutates and transformation persists. Here, place is not a destination, but a field of ongoing translation—a landscape where the familiar becomes strange, and the strange becomes a new kind of home.
— Paulina Ascenco Fuentes
