Elisa Carollo
2026-01-22 16:56:00
There is a primordial energy, both telluric and feminine, that animates Hilda Palafox’s latest body of work. It’s a generative feminine force, at once of the physical earth and of Mother Earth. The protagonist of this new series is the earth as matter, as origin, as the site where nature holds all its potential and where life can sprout and flourish at any moment or persist resiliently against the counterforces of human-led destruction. On view at Sean Kelly in Chelsea through February 21, this group of paintings evokes a power rooted in ecology, the body and cyclical processes, historically associated with fertility, creation and an intuitive, symbiotic sense of care—forms of relational and reparative knowledge opposed to subjugation, exploitation and control.
Titled “De Tierra y Susurros,” the exhibition invites viewers “to pay attention to these whispers, to what the earth is trying to tell us,” as the artist put it when we walked through together just after the opening. For Palafox, these works are acts of listening as much as an exercise in symbolic and mythical representation.
Drawing from the rich iconographic and stylistic heritage of pre-Columbian aesthetics and Mexican muralism, Palafox channels these spiritually and politically charged modes of visual storytelling into a contemporary ecofeminist sensibility. Still, her work does not isolate the female body—or even the human body more broadly—within the contained cluster of identity politics, choosing instead to interrogate its position within a larger environmental, biological and affective system, one defined by vital networks of energetic and biological interdependence.
Animating this exhibition is a growing awareness Palafox has developed of ecofeminist thinking, particularly of how its two principal strands might converse and diverge. One, more constructivist or materialist, argues that women are not inherently closer to nature but have historically paid closer attention to it and acted accordingly—noticing, for instance, when river water became contaminated or when subtle environmental shifts occurred. The other strand is more spiritual and cosmological. It does not claim an essential connection between women and nature but recognizes how forms of knowledge associated with the feminine—intuition, cyclical thinking, embodied attention—have historically remained attuned to the earth precisely because they were excluded from dominant, patriarchal and extractive systems of rationality.
Yet, as the artist emphasizes, her work is not feminist in a politically univocal sense. Rather, she hopes it can resonate across genders and generations—a response she already witnessed at the opening, as women and men alike approached her to share how deeply the works spoke to them. “I’m really talking about humanity as a whole. And also about how these figures appear physically. They’re in this fetal position, almost guarding this small patch of dry soil,” Palafox explained. “You can’t really tell whether they’re men or women, except maybe because of the hair. But even that is uncertain. I’m playing with this androgynous, universal, archetypal figure.”
What Palafox ultimately seeks is not the assertion of a gendered position but the reawakening of a feminine dimension within all human beings. Echoing Jung’s reflections in The Red Book, this feminine principle is not opposed to the masculine but functions as its necessary counterpart: a psychic force capable of tempering both destructive impulses and passive withdrawal, restoring balance through integration rather than opposition, through a caring spirit that is part of the experience of fully inhabiting what it means to be human.
Within this framework, the feminine is not understood as a biological destiny but as a telluric and relational principle—an immanent force tied to care, maternal gestation, regeneration and cyclical time, rather than to masculine mastery, exploitation or domination. Anchoring the exhibition, [title placeholder] depicts two muscular, androgynous figures curled on the ground, suspended between tension and both mutual and oppositional defense, as they tend to the fragile presence of a flower. A circular movement binds them together, suggesting a chain of mutual support, solidarity and continuity—an ongoing descent into depth and matter, followed by a resurfacing that affirms life, care and persistence over destruction, death and disappearance.
These figures can be read as contemporary custodians or heroines of that natural circle, while also resonating with timeless, trans-cultural archetypes found across ancient systems of thought. They might recall pre-Columbian warriors, for whom strength was inseparable from cosmology, ritual and the cyclical forces of the earth, or even Japanese samurai and Chinese warriors, whose often androgynous presence embodied discipline, balance and ethical force grounded in alignment with a Dao-like sense of harmony and cooperation with society and nature rather than domination. Their statuary muscular stillness situates them within an epic, mythological register, suspended outside linear time and, at the same time, fully attuned to the enduring rhythms of the cosmos, inhabiting a liminal space between fragility and resilience, destruction and regeneration, in a continuous cycle of becoming.
With these works, Palafox is also clearly addressing the climate crisis. “That’s why the colors in that work are much more intense—more red, more heat. There’s a physical sense of heat in it,” she acknowledged. Yet the figures are holding on… to the ground, to themselves… attempting to reintegrate their bodies and reattune within a broader network and a fast-changing environment. “This feels also like a continuation of a theme I’ve already been working on: solidarity between figures, a sense of community—especially between female figures—as a way of confronting all of this together.” The monumental presence that characterizes Palafox’s figures, at once grounded and symbolic, elevates them into a timeless, mythic dimension: less representations than presences, less answers than invitations to listen, to practice empathy with the earth as it whispers, and to stand together rather than against opposing forces.
Opening the show at the very entrance is another powerfully symbolic painting depicting a group of female figures holding onto one another as they ritualistically dance around an erupting volcano. The framing is unusual for the artist, markedly more cinematic than the monumentally frontal compositions she often employs, suggesting the possibility of an ongoing ritual in which viewers are already implicated. What Palafox depicts here is a potent expression of feminine, or more precisely, feminine energetic spirituality, alongside an embrace of the alchemical cycle embodied by one of nature’s most extreme manifestations: the volcano, a sudden eruption of the earth’s energies breaking through the surface of reality.
“After a volcanic eruption, the ground often becomes extremely fertile. So there’s this connection between destruction and fertility that felt very important to me,” Palafox said, explaining that placing the painting at the beginning of the exhibition was instinctive rather than overthought, and only later revealed itself as foundational in setting the tone.
A group of new bas-reliefs introduced in the exhibition is made by gently carving—rather than extracting—from Mexican cantera stone, a material formed over time through the accumulation of volcanic ash and mineral deposits. This slow sedimentation of matter and energy becomes part of the work itself. By carving into this geological memory, Palafox embodies her belief in a symbiotic integration between human presence and nature, between natural and geological rhythms and anthropological forces that ultimately exist only through mutual complementation.
“I chose it intuitively at first, but then it really started to make sense,” Palafox reflected, explaining how in Mexican cultures the volcano carries many meanings, representing both creation and destruction. “In a way, the whole exhibition is about resilience and about how nature and the body go through moments of damage and collapse, yet have the ability to start over again and again.”
Ultimately, the works in the exhibition are not about a feminist fight against the destructive machista order that has shaped much of Western capitalist thinking, but rather about a humanist invitation to tap into archetypal images and mythic storytelling to recover that feminine side of reattunement with the earth and with the broader cosmos of relations. Finding rhythm again. Finding the gentle touch. Finding a quiet, resilient spirit amid ongoing destruction.
What makes Palafox’s work so epically timeless is its ability to address ecological catastrophe, migration and colonization through universal, recurring mythic patterns. In one work, two women exchange gestures of care and butterflies as they connect just beyond a gridded fence, a barrier imposed by an external force. “For me, this is the only piece where I’m explicitly including something made by humans—something designed to contain, to separate, to divide,” Palafox said. “Ecofeminist thought often talks about how the exploitation of the land is connected to the exploitation of the body, and that idea really stayed with me.”
In works such as Luciérnaga (2025), Palafox returns to the Romantic notion of the sublime rediscovered at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution: nature as overwhelming, uncontrollable, radically beyond human comprehension, yet capable of shaking us into an awareness of both our finitude and our creative power. Immersed in darkness, a massive Venus flytrap holds a firefly—the only point of light—as a fragile emblem of hope amid the relentless generative force of nature and imagination.
Not by chance, in paintings such as Umbral, the human body appears less as a closed form than a porous membrane and a vessel inherently connected, at both sensorial and cognitive levels, to a broader cosmos once reawakened beyond the veil. This awareness unfolds gradually throughout the exhibition, beginning with Susurros II (2025), where figures touch a tree in search of emotional and empathic connection, retrieving a primordial ritual of wisdom eclipsed by capitalist systems rooted in Renaissance and positivist humanism, which placed the human at the center while erasing the surrounding environment that shaped biological, spiritual and psychological evolution.
We then encounter two women standing before a gnarled, ancient tree, naked in their most primordial physical and emotional presence, already fertile with a new awareness or perhaps gestating its consequences. The tree between them, with a worm in its cavity, functions as both connector and extension, as if the figures might reunite into one within the continuous cycle of gestation, growth, decay and regeneration that governs both cosmic and human life.
Another key work in the show, Resiliencia I (2025), stands as a central statement anchoring the entire exhibition. Here, the figure, a heroine or universal hero, sits confronting the heaviness of the human condition against the ecological disaster unfolding in the mirror. Its fractured surface echoes a rupture with the real essence of reality and within the earth itself, suggesting a fundamental shift in how reality must be perceived and understood. “That piece is about confronting the results of our actions,” Palafox explained. “It’s another work in which a human-made object appears: the mirror. It reflects the destruction, the broken land, the broken scenario that we’ve created ourselves.” Yet even here, resilience persists. “In a very surreal way, nature begins again, even within what feels like a black hole. In the fracture, there’s the possibility of a new line. You can see that something is broken, but there’s also a small fire in the background, still burning.”
If myths have long conveyed humanity’s cyclical struggle between progress and regression, and if Mexican muralists, like the fresco painters before them, used symbolic language to suggest alternative epistemologies, Palafox’s visual vocabulary expresses a similar pendular movement. It reflects women’s experience of the world across time, social structures and cultural shifts, while also pointing toward a broader collective need to reconnect with a feminine, caring intelligence capable of understanding nature’s cycles beyond the noise of economic and political ideologies.
In the largest painting in the space, Tierra Sombra Tostada (2025), Palafox crystallizes this synthesis through a form of synesthetic abstraction: reduced to a bitonal composition, the figures appear almost geological, as if they were tesserae within the earth’s own evolutionary puzzle. “The color is called Tierra Sombra Tostada, which in English can be translated as burnt umber,” Palafox said. “In Spanish, I found it much more poetic; it turns Tierra Sombra Tostada, something like ‘burnt shadow soil.’ For me, that felt very beautiful. It’s also essentially the color I used to build all the different shapes in that piece. I found it really amazing that a single pigment, a single earth color, could generate the entire form of thinking.”
As in ancient myths, Palafox’s visual language becomes a coded counter-cosmology aimed at reestablishing balance and harmony between human and cosmic forces. In a time dominated by algorithmic narratives, the archetypal and mythological force carried by her paintings offers the possibility of discovering or reawakening alternative ways of imagining life, grounded in the same primordial symbolic power that once shaped sacred representations of fecundity and war, life and death.
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