Milena Muzquiz

Casa Escuela presents Hot Served Cold, a solo exhibition by Milena Muzquiz (1972, Tijuana, Mexico), bringing together fifteen of her most recent works made in ceramic, watercolor, oil painting, and textile.

Teorema, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, begins almost in silence. A stranger, whose identity is never revealed, takes up residence in the home of a bourgeois family. He is a young man of angelic appearance, attractive, with a mysterious, seductive, and at times demonic gaze.

His presence triggers a process of revelation: each family member is forced to confront their repressed desires and the emptiness sustaining their apparent normality. The visitor embodies a beauty that transcends the physical and an intellectual awareness that amplifies his magnetism. His arrival sparks an inner revolution in each character. The family, once seemingly perfect, reveals itself as a prison built upon its own ideals. Sexuality, freedom, and thought become the driving forces of a transformation that liberates but also dismantles the certainties upon which their existence once rested.

The father confesses that his image of himself has been destroyed. The son realizes he can no longer be like others. The mother, once empty, discovers her capacity to love. The daughter experiences an emotional awakening that exposes the fragility of desire. And the maid, upon leaving and returning to her village, acquires the power to perform miracles, a spiritual liberation that completes the cycle.

Milena’s work bears a deep connection to this film. Though her practice erupts with euphoria, it also emerges from silence, like the stranger who enters the house in Teorema. Milena has come to disrupt our lives, not to instruct us on how to live, but to show us how to be free through the very freedom her work embodies.

After a long trajectory, as a member of Los Super Elegantes and through music, performance, photography, and installation, Milena no longer seeks questions or answers but rather follows her impulses. She lets go of accumulated experience, allowing her instincts to dictate the path and to generate her own language: the ultimate state of artistic freedom.

In her work, interior and exterior collapse into one another. Curtains can be read as sculptures, or as objects weary of themselves, longing for transformation. A painting becomes a curtain; a tiled wall, a table. Her practice speaks of a domestic delirium, a rebellion of everyday objects that refuse to keep fulfilling their assigned roles. Domestic objects, childhood bikini patterns, curtains, and tablecloths that once adorned the interior of an apparently perfect home now rise as a new flag of imperfection. Like the stranger in Teorema, Milena acts as a force of liberation, not only upon objects but also upon those who behold them. To witness her work is to witness a miracle: her autonomy as an artist and as a person is contagious. Her presence invites us to question the mechanisms that enslave us to social protocol. This exhibition at Casa Escuela does not merely inhabit a space; it transforms it, reminding us that freedom, more than an ideal, is something we must continually pursue.

— Miguel Calderón

In collaboration with Travesía Cuatro. All pieces are available for viewing and acquisition during the exhibition period.

Hours:
Monday – Wednesday: by appointment via email at info@casaescuela.mx
Thursday – Saturday: 10 am – 2 pm / 3 pm – 6 pm