Manuel Pidal

De lo camaleónico y otras bestias (Of the Chameleonic and Other Beasts) by Manuel Pidal will be presented during Art Week 2026 at Proyectos Multipropósito.

Drawing from a pictorial research process, Pidal proposes the chameleonic as a strategy for approaching the encounter between Christian and Mexica deities—specifically, the crucified Christ and Coatlicue, whose name in Nahuatl means “She of the Serpent Skirt,” the goddess of Mother Earth.

Seeking to distance himself from gods understood as symbols that aim toward synthesis or mutual assimilation, Pidal frames the chameleonic as an animal teaching in which territory—with its power dynamics, erotic charge, and social imbalance—dictates the camouflage necessary to outwit the predator.

Here, the change of color functions not only as a vital aesthetic but also as a methodology of pictorial production. In the artist’s words: “In the series, the chameleonic operates as an exercise in glazing, made with different black pigments, resembling the way light bounces and stimulates the chromatophores across the various layers of a chameleon’s dermis. The lower the refractive index, the more translucent the color; the higher the refractive index, the greater the opacity.”

At the heart of the exhibition is a chapel that, far from invoking a universal force, seeks to incite a faith in constant transformation, where multiple paradigms can coexist. Pidal states: “I refuse to reconcile gods. This is not a painting with the burrs of Vasconcelism.” In this series, there is no story that overcomes itself in the form of a god; instead, there is a complexity that at times bleeds, at others sinks its fangs, sometimes devours from behind, and at others plays at sublimating the very meaning of encounter.

The artist draws from references such as The Swan, No. 14 by Hilma af Klint and Nuestros dioses (Our Gods) by Saturnino Herrán—paintings in which there is no moment of homogenization between forces, but rather an ongoing dispute: a tension that makes the political visible, what yields and what resists at the same time.

— Sandra Sánchez, Curator