Mariana Sánchez

Ambar Quijano presents Stage Fright: On Setting a Still Life on Fire, a solo exhibition by Mariana Sánchez.

The exhibition brings to life a pictorial universe anchored in a series of recurring motifs and interests: femininity, the table, the domestic, theatricality, and family dynamics, that she employs to set up emotional stages where intimacy and relational tension quietly unfold.

Within these layered environments, femininity appears fluid and multifaceted, motherhood is reexamined, and family dynamics surface through intimacy and a quietly deployed relational tension. Influenced by Mirian Cahn, James Ensor, Rita Ackermann, Gilberto Aceves Navarro, Cy Twombly, Louise Bourgeois, and others, Sánchez deploys a visceral application of paint and constructs scenes that oscillate between the intimate and the perturbing, thus transforming relationships and quotidian gestures into encounters loaded with a tension that appears to resist any type of containment.

This idea is further emphasized through a persistent sense of hybridity. Figures drift between the human and the animal, or surrender entirely to the animalesque, and in doing so introduce instinctual forces that subvert codes of domesticity in favor of operating according to their own unruly rhythms. These parallelisms with the animal world extend beyond subject matter and seep into the very language of the paintings themselves.

At times, Sánchez's approach becomes almost cartoonesque, historically linked to satire, while elsewhere it adopts a child-like immediacy that heightens the absurdity embedded within everyday life. Through playful yet psychologically loaded compositions, she gravitates toward gestural and humor-inflected abstraction, portraying domestic encounters as scenes suspended between tenderness, discomfort, irony, and disorder.

—Ambar Quijano