Existing between the visible and the invisible, Erica Mahinay’s works engage the structure of painting as surface and affective, engaging in dialogue with its presence as body, memory and thought. The same concept informs his biomorphic images of disjointed bodies rendered as unfinished forms. Building on the momentum created by his installation in the recent “Made in LA” edition at the Hammer Museum, Mahinay presents the Make Room at Frieze Los Angeles with pieces that are the culmination of a ten-year process of rigorous studio experimentation. Working in many mediums, his practice examines the human likeness, perception and understanding of material things.
Straddling the intersection of gestural capture and phenomenological inquiry, and deliberately dwelling on the border between capture and thought, her work is, in both process and presence, a sustained meditation on emplacement and material consciousness. It touches something at the core of our connection with the world, along with the dimensions of the mind, emotions and thoughts. When the Observer caught up with Mahinay before Frieze, he explained that during his early explorations, as he searched for a conceptual basis for his work, he was deeply drawn to memento mori and still life painting. These references shaped his early releases, which included still lifes but quickly expanded beyond the usual boundaries of portraits into mixed media reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s compositions, where the painted objects pushed out into space and took on a sculptural form.
That became the basis of his ongoing interest in the conflict between painting as material and painting as an illusionary window—an essential linguistic form at the core of quotation that animates his entire practice. “That’s the conversation that I think the abstract is having—the nature of the painting, and the embrace or neglect of the painting as this entry space,” he reflects. Over time, these questions became less realistic and materialistic, as he no longer felt compelled to represent them directly. His subsequent experiments with fabric marked a significant change, which allowed him to collapse the expansive field of composite images back into an area that was technically two-dimensional but still held a tangible tactile depth. Working primarily with stitched silk for nearly ten years, he explored various levels of light while deliberately exposing supports and structural supports, using these elements to explore the basic structures of painting and question, primarily, what constitutes painting itself.
A constant engagement with the face gradually led Mahinay to think of the image as something almost wearable—something that can be tried on, like an identity or a temporary state of being. “There was this kind of acknowledgment through painting and appearing as an agreement between me and the viewer,” she said. In the 10 years he spent working with textiles, he also found himself rediscovering color through the dyeing process, which he saw as very different from using pigment. “I think I fell in love with color again,” he said, thinking that this renewed relationship with chromatic depth and material presence eventually led him to oil painting, with a greater awareness of the alchemical power of color to transform tactile objects into fictional universes and poetry.
His most recent paintings have evolved from techniques based on classical underpainting, beginning with earthy colors—burnt sienna, burnt amber and Dutch brown—which establish a chromatic foundation that he uses with responsive gestures. It’s a very traditional process, closer to 16th century landscape or figurative painting than modern illustration. “I use burnt resins and burnt siennas in one area, then erase the lights and darks to create contrast and get the idea of figure-ground. It forms the basic color of the painting,” he explained. This first phase happens quickly and accurately, as he must work within a limited time to shape this tonal relationship before the face is stable. There are no preparatory drawings, predetermined plans or color studies; each painting emerges organically, guided by a responsive dialogue with previous works or gestures that may choose to expand or resist as the process progresses.
From that first underpainting, you apply a little titanium or white lead. When white is placed over brown, it produces a color mixing effect historically associated with painters such as Caravaggio, whose subtle tonal changes evoke the sensation of light passing through space. The interaction creates unexpected chromatic shifts—soft blues, pinks, and purples—that the eye registers as atmospheric depth rather than actual color. “For me, it creates a familiarity that the eye associates with looking into space, with light passing through space and reflecting back. Your brain eliminates the color. It usually results in a soft pink, blue or purple,” said Mahinay. For him, this is the alchemy of painting. “You can create something completely new with two very different colors. Burnt sienna is this bright orange, and then you put a layer of white on top of it, and suddenly it produces these soft, greenish blues. It feels like magic.”
In this intuitive and tactile first stage, Mahinay conveys an automatic method of transference to the canvas, which he said may include the influence of his mother, a psychiatric nurse who integrated somatic practices such as dance into her therapeutic practice. “I believe that movement and gestures bring your knowledge about it,” she said. “That’s part of how I trust the process—that I know I’m playing something or channeling it.”
However, after this first stage, the process is slow, as it allows each layer to dry fully to maintain its chromatic balance. Each painting develops through a long and individual relationship, often accumulating density over time and with major chromatic and structural shifts. Some works change dramatically in palette and identity as they respond to the artist’s inner genius and emerging presence. “I think I’m taking from the culture of looking and observing and combining it with the culture of touching and making understandable marks, and an impact beyond that,” he revealed.
The final drawing emerges from this ongoing and over-the-top discussion of closure and remains open to interpretation. Mahinay is quick to point out that his paintings are not intended to communicate a direct personal narrative. “I don’t expect anyone to remove anything about me from the canvas,” he said, although he admits that living knowledge enters the work. “Everything I see and learn ends up at work in one way or another.” In that sense, the canvases form both a record of experience and a question of how perception emerges from the body, how surfaces capture memory and how internal emotional states take external form.
His paintings are often open, but in this new body of work, he presents a self-imposing method: a light grid with shimmering lines of light crossing the canvas, serving as both a formal tool and a philosophical proposition. Bright and powerful currents of paint spread beyond this grid, as if bypassing the symbolic systems humans have devised to contain the natural nature of the universe and our own mind, suspended between imagination and the unconscious.
This conflict with the increasingly diminishing nature of experience, and the attempt to reintroduce perception through material form, extends to the ceramic sculptures in the presentation. Developed at Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, Mahinay’s anthropomorphic forms are suspended in a liquid, amorphous medium—unfinished fragments of a lower body placed in regions of rest. “I wanted that body language to show a state of observation or reception or meditation or pausing,” she said. In their unresolved state, these bodies seem to inhabit what Informel poetry describes as a formless domain—not as the absence of form, but as a form of continuous evolution, resisting closure and unchanging separation.
Mahinay’s opportunity for ceramics grew out of the desire to expand the scale and presence of the space he had previously explored into a physical register, supported by the technical resources and interface available to him. In the Frieze, the sculptures are accompanied by separate arms holding glass mirrors, which preserve a trace of human presence while emphasizing their separateness. At the same time, the raw quality of their surfaces preserves the immediacy of the artist’s touch, which unites clay as one of the materials of human ancestors. Suspended between artifact and artifact, these scars appear as archaeological remains of the present charged with temporal ambiguity. In their growing sensuousness, they stand as silent acts of resistance to the ever-present manifestation of experience in this later stage of civilization. What they highlight is ultimately the irreducible nature of embodied experience—the organic ordering system that remains at the core of Mahinay’s practice, where doing and feeling emerge as one continuous, harmonious action.
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