Hiding, 2025
Oil on linen
Opening September 5th, 2025
PROXYCO Gallery, 88 Eldridge Street, New York, NY 10002
Lucía Vidales: Painting as Metamorphosis
The history of painting has returned, time and again, to moments in which the image ceases to be stable, where it unsettles rather than clarifies. Francisco de Goya’s Pinturas Negras (1819–1823) are an early touchstone: bodies emerge out of darkness only to sink back into it, spectral and unresolved, as if caught between presence and dissolution. Painted on the walls of his house in the twilight of his life, these works resist allegory and instead embody the instability of vision itself, anticipating the modernist and surrealist fascination with ambiguity and dislocation.[1]
Mexico, by the mid-twentieth century, became a fertile ground for surrealist experimentation. Artists such as Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, exiles from Europe during the Second World War, found in Mexico a landscape where myth, folklore, and dream could merge seamlessly. Their works placed transformation at the center: figures morphed into animals, plants, or cosmic energies, never anchored in a single identity. This tradition formed a visual language in which the body was never complete but always in flux, a porous site for metamorphosis and reinvention.[2] It is within this extended genealogy—from Goya’s haunted dissolutions to Carrington’s enchanted hybrids—that one can situate the paintings of Lucía Vidales.
Vidales’s canvases are defined by instability. Her figures never settle into coherence; instead, they flicker between anthropomorphic suggestion and near-abstraction. At times, the eye discerns a torso or a limb, only for these elements to blur into surrounding textures. The distinction between figure and background collapses, replaced by a restless oscillation where form appears provisional, contingent, always on the verge of becoming something else.
This emphasis on the body as a process rather than a fixed entity resonates with philosophical traditions that privilege transformation over permanence. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of “becoming” describes precisely such states of passage, where the subject moves beyond rigid identity to enter zones of multiplicity—becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-imperceptible.[3] Vidales’s work enacts this becomingscape: her images are less depictions than thresholds, moments where the human body loses solidity and begins to morph into other registers.
Philosopher Rosi Braidotti has argued for a “nomadic subject,” one that resists stability and is instead defined by motion, fragmentation, and relation.[4] Vidales’s painted figures echo this nomadism. They are unstable composites, drifting across the canvas without fixed borders, porous to their environments. They appear to migrate between states rather than anchor themselves, embodying a condition of contemporary life that is increasingly defined by precarity, displacement, and hybridity.
Literary and cinematic precedents deepen this resonance. In Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), Gregor Samsa’s sudden transformation into an insect exposes the fragility of selfhood and the alienness of one’s own body.[5] David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) stages this metamorphosis viscerally, showing the horror not in death itself but in the slow dissolution of the human into the monstrous.[6] Vidales achieves a comparable affect through painterly means: her works are charged with a similar sense of becoming, where forms oscillate between comic grotesque and existential unease.
Yet what distinguishes Vidales is her capacity to balance menace with humor. Her visual language is playful, often sly. Line and color undermine the stability of the figure, but they do so with a mischievous vitality. Garish or unexpected hues inject vibrancy into grotesque configurations; loose, searching outlines leave figures deliberately porous, as if refusing closure. This humor does not cancel out the uncanny but infuses it with complexity, making her canvases at once unsettling and oddly joyful.
In this way, Vidales extends painting into a speculative terrain. Her work is not only a meditation on form but also on subjectivity itself. By blurring the line between figure and background, she refuses the hierarchy of subject over ground, body over environment, or human over nonhuman. Her paintings argue that all subjects are contingent, unstable, and in motion. They are propositions about what it means to exist in a world where categories collapse and new hybrids continually emerge.
Ultimately, Vidales offers a visual vocabulary attuned to instability—rich in humor, playful in its form, and deeply philosophical in its refusal of fixed identity. Vidales contributes a contemporary grammar for thinking the body as an unstable site of becoming. Her work invites us to linger in the space of flux, where forms are provisional—reminding us that to see the body is to see it already in transformation.
— Humberto Moro
[1] Janis Tomlinson, Goya: Order and Disorder (Boston: MFA Publications, 2014), 233–45.
[2] Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 97–120.
[3] Gille es Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 232–309.
[4] Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 5–9.
[5] Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. Stanley Corngold (New York: Bantam, 1972), 3–24.
[6] The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg (Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 1986).
Lucía Vidales (1986) is a Mexican artist based in Monterrey, Mexico. Vidales’s work is concerned, above all, with painting. The body is recurrent as figure, as the painted gaze, and as the painting itself. Fragmented limbs often seem to emerge from, or sink into, the luminous or shadowy depths of her painterly surfaces. For Vidales, painting can transform time, our relationship with matter and how we experience our own bodies. She is interested in a liminal and polyvalent use of color and a fluid relationship with drawing. Her work is informed by the consequences of historical and colonial imaginaries as they continue to impact actual bodies and the body of painting itself. The beings that populate her paintings suggest the potential for confrontation, but seldom follow through. Instead, they play with humor or anxiety, or seek consolation from ancient wounds.
Vidales is an Art Professor at University of Monterrey (UDEM) in Mexico. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a BA in Visual Arts from “La Esmeralda” National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking of the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL); and has been awarded the Jóvenes Creadores grant three times by the Ministry of Culture in Mexico. Her recent solo exhibitions include: Museo Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico (2023-24); PROXYCO Gallery, New York (2021); Galería Karen Huber, Mexico City (2021); PEANA, Monterrey, Mexico (2021); Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (2020); Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City (2019); among others. Group shows include: The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art has commissioned a large-scale installation by Vidales for its ninth annual Atrium Project (2024-25), 15th FEMSA Biennial, Guanajuato, Mexico (2024); Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas (2023); Sapar Contemporary [at Piero Atchugarry Gallery], Miami (2020-21); Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City (2020); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019).