Mariana Castillo Deball's 'In a Convex Mirror' at Pinksummer, Genoa

Mariana Castillo Deball (Mexico City, 1975) presents 'In a Convex Mirror', a solo exhibition at Pinksummer in Genoa, inaugurated on December 2, 2022. The show challenges cultural hierarchies by rethinking form and display. The white cube becomes a stage where perception is manipulated to dismantle constructs linking an object's appearance to its presumed value. Black wax discs on the walls are engraved with drawings by missionary friar Diego Valadés, used to evangelize Central American peoples. Stylized images of snakes, scorpions, humans, and imaginary creatures appear as if seen through a convex lens, merging Parmigianino's 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror' (1574) with Mesoamerican art, inscribed on wax tablets recalling ancient Roman ephemeral messaging. A site-specific installation features a tangle of ceramics suspended from the ceiling by thick black cotton rope. The slip-decorated vessels have kill holes, referencing funerary rites of various indigenous American populations, and are modularly interlocked reminiscent of a Klein bottle, blurring inside and outside. The ceramics refuse traditional vitrine display that would reduce them to folkloric tokens; instead, they are removed from both museum space and Eurocentric historical perspective. For Castillo Deball, the surface of things is the physical site of encounter between the gaze and all the object's histories, a vivaciously unstable equilibrium of tensions that inform reality.