SERPIENTE SOLAR - NOCHE OBSIDIANA: SOLO SHOW OMAR MENDOZA CURATED BY VICTORIA RIVERS

SERPIENTE SOLAR 〰NOCHE OBSIDIANA

(SOLAR SERPENT 〰 OBSIDIAN NIGHT)

SOLO SHOW BY OMAR MENDOZA

CURATED BY VICTORIA RIVERS 

4/ 10/2025

POVOS GALLERY - CHICAGO

    POVOS Gallery is proud to present "Solar Serpent – Obsidian Night," the first solo exhibition by Mexican artist Omar Mendoza (1993, Mexico City) at the gallery, curated by Victoria Rivers. This exhibition marks a significant milestone in POVOS's ongoing commitment to creating an international platform for emerging artists whose practices delve into unique, visionary, and deeply rooted ancestral narratives. Mendoza's work, imbued with ecological and spiritual sensitivity, aligns with the gallery's mission by invoking an aesthetic based on transformation, memory, and Mesoamerican cosmovision.

SERPIENTE SOLAR 〰 NOCHE OBSIDIANA

SOLAR SERPENT 〰 OBSIDIAN NIGHT

    In the beginning, everything was thought. So tell the Wise Elders: before flesh, bone and tree, the world was ordered in spirit¹. That primordial thought lives on in us as ancestral wisdom that is not learned from books but inherited in our bones, knowledge that emerges when we allow our hands to remember what they have always known.

Serpiente Solar – Noche Obsidiana begins from that first ancestral pillar, the cosmic origins, where art is not representation but distilled memory. Omar Mendoza creates these works from a cosmovision in which everything is alive and in relationship: water, stone, plants, fire, night. In that web of sacred correspondences, painting becomes an act of reciprocity with the earth and its cycles.

    If the works in this exhibition were fully explicable, they would not transform us. The only possible key to reading is not a fixed interpretation, but a perpetual dance that unfolds through serpentine territory where sacred dualities promise as reward the most authentic of rituals: vital experience.

    Creation is born from return. When his mother whispered "those plants are still there, in your father's village," Omar Mendoza understood that his colors had their own geography. From his father he had inherited the patience that knows the times of craft; from his mother, the observation of nature. In that return home converted into research, he went back to Tlacuilotepec, Puebla, where he discovered that color emerges from a millennial dance between fire and water, transmuting the muitle plant², where, according to ancient memories, "they gathered, arrived and celebrated council in darkness and night"³ to give birth to color.

He understood that each pigment is plant memory transformed by hands that listen, wait, and let matter speak. In this revelation he found the origin of his method: following "that organic rhythm that cannot be hurried, that knows when seeds are ready to germinate, when colors have found their truth."⁴

    In his process, the studio is kitchen, laboratory and altar; each pictorial gesture, a slow invocation where transformation reveals itself as intimate conversation between elements that discover, in their encounter, possibilities that none possessed in solitude.

Serpiente Solar – Noche Obsidiana is alchemy, a great stellar mantle of time and magic where the future is also inscribed. In this exhibition, each work reveals itself as a door toward forms of knowledge where symbology interweaves with mutation: a new way of inhabiting the world. The question is no longer just where do we come from? but where can we go when we recover the wisdom we thought was lost?

    In the stillness that resists the vertigo of the world, creating thus is a form of resistance against the speed of forgetting, invoking ancient wisdom that reminds us that only at nature's rhythm does the true occur. In this exhibition, Omar Mendoza summons an ancient weaving that still beats, a council woven in image, directed to those who still know how to wait.

Victoria Rivers Curator and writer

1. Eduardo A. Rueda and Nicolás Rueda, "Un techo entretejido, memoria del origen y porvenir," in Retornar al origen: narrativas ancestrales sobre humanidad, tiempo y mundo, ed. Óscar Bonilla et al. (Buenos Aires: CLACSO; Montevideo: UNESCO, 2022).

2. Muitle: Mexican plant (Justicia spicigera) from which blue, purple, gray and black pigments are extracted.

3. Popol Wuj, El libro consejo de los mayas (Guatemala: Editorial Dante Universal, 2018).

4. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (Barnes & Noble, 1992).