My cellphone has stopped functioning at optimal speeds due to the vast accumulation of sentimental information: photographs in multiple styles and framings, voice notes overanalyzing romantic and work situations, videos meant to shorten distances, stickers, and spam. Faced with this excess of materialities, one cannot help but wonder what will become of all our personal files. Notas de Voz [Voice Notes] is an installation by artist Elsa-Louise Manceaux at Museo Jumex that also allows information to pass through. Curated by Marielsa Castro, Rosela del Bosque, and Natalia Vargas, the exhibition consists of three paintings onto which typographies are projected—typographies that function as containers for different kinds of messages and words, as well as translations of the artist’s own voice notes. The intimate dimensions of the work become evident the moment we hear gentle intonations—some urgent—and varied accents circulating through the gallery space.

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War Won’t Work is the first exhibition that C. S. Valentin (1979), a French designer based in Mexico, presents under his own name. The show features an installation that the curatorial text situates “somewhere between a teenage bedroom and a woodland shrine”—the phrase appears in English—though it reminds me more of a department store: spaced-out objects and uniform lighting. That risk always looms when exhibiting collectible design, I suppose, but AGO Projects has shown it can be avoided, as it was last December with Accesorios Espaciales by APRDELESP.

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Manuela Solano presents more than 30 large-format paintings in the biggest exhibition of her career thus far: Alien Queen/Paraíso Extraño, at the Museo Tamayo. That seems like a good point of departure for my commentary: the sense that this is a large, expansive show. Many paintings—tall, one after another—many faces and references, and the sheer scale of the building itself, emphasized by the decision to color one of its walls, which I’ll address later. The opening lines of the wall text state that this body of work took seven years to complete. Seven years! How does an exhibition project sustain itself over seven years? What astonishes me first is its vastness placed in the service of multiplicity—a lucid overstimulation that I can scarcely take in fully. The works and their installation bear layers built from the inside out, which I associate with the density of a questioning around identity. They also open pathways that can be followed side-to-side, unfolding another kind of reflection, closer to the implications of pop within visual culture.

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Galería Ambar Quijano presents Painting as Medium: an Alchemy of Image and Matter, featuring the work of Juana Subercaseaux, Meryl Yana, Isabella Russo Siqueira, Andrea Bores Chemor, Mariana Paniagua, and Sandra Leal. The exhibition, which wagers on painting as a space of transformation and a center of alchemy, prompts us to ask: where does the eye come to rest? What does it cling to when faced with an abstract image?

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