Milagros Rojas, Mother, Witch, Monster, Guide, at guadalajara90210, Guadalajara

Mother, Witch, Monster, Guide by Milagros Rojas, at guadalajara90210, Guadalajara, 27/09/2025 – 20/12/2025.

If I were to stare at my hands upon entering the exhibition space, I’d see a spiral too, the same shape that once terrified Blaise Pascal. A form that tightens and expands at once, that gestures toward the infinite only to recoil from it, like a thought coiling beneath the visitor’s skin. Stepping into guadalajara90210, the spiral follows me, not as ornament, but as an intelligence: organizing, repeating, and subtracting meaning as it moves. What does it mean to inhabit a surface that feels like both promise and threat? It’s a question that clings to you, slowly, sharply, as you move through Mother, Witch, Monster, Guide. Rojas doesn’t merely invite you to look, she asks you to navigate a mesh of signs, tensions, and absences that refuse to remain silent.

The atmosphere is one of ferocious precision. Light doesn’t celebrate, it modulates, it doesn’t illuminate, it reveals. The walls resemble topographical planes, as if the gallery were a surveyor’s office, but without the comfort of maps. Visitors move as though within a mental labyrinth, following a rhythm that’s not sequential but circular. Hung images and sculptural objects, almost always pale, yet dense, respond to each other like echoes: a drawing amplifies a sculpture, an emptiness tangles with a plane, and everything reflects the conceptual and visual torsions of the spiral threading through it all.

Rojas’s works treat the surface like a membrane, a boundary that is also a threshold. Her sculptures, seemingly flat, appear to resist their own two-dimensionality, striving for depth. In Flat Narcissus, the sculpture turns on itself, doubles its gaze and retracts it, but what seems like reflection is in fact a question: where does the body end, and where does the echo begin? In her drawings, matter contracts and expands like a landscape exhausted by linear interpretation. The mark, mechanical, distorted, reads like a gaze folding in on itself, unsure whether to watch or flee.

It’s not just a matter of material or gesture, it’s the choice of medium that constructs a grammar of suspicion and opening. Surface is never neutral, it is a site of potential. The bones drawn in Pleasure and Anxiety are not remnants but transitional nodes, signposts in a thinking that rejects linear narrative. Order unravels, is restitched, opens up to unexpected twists. Repetition is not repetition, it is mutation. And so the spiral is no decorative motif but a thinking structure, connecting flatness and volume, surface and escape, line and fold.

A surface that refuses to be reduced to plane, a void that cannot be filled. This is a show that, like a spiral in the left hand, offers more questions than answers, and for that very reason, it stays with you, carrying you past the threshold into that space where the visit becomes memory.

-Fakewhale