Erica Mahinay’s Explorations of the Threshold Between the Seen and the Sensed
Erica Mahinay with layered pink, orange and burgundy gestures intersected by translucent vertical lines." width="970" height="728" data-caption='Erica Mahinay’s practice occupies the intersection of gestural abstraction and phenomenological inquiry. <span class="media-credit">Photo by Jeff McLane</span>'>
Existing between the physical and the abstract, Erica Mahinay’s works engage painting’s physicality as surface and tactile matter, entering into dialogue with its existence as body, memory and imagination. A similar sensibility informs her biomorphic sculptures of disjointed bodies rendered as unfinished forms. Building on the momentum generated by her inclusion in the most recent iteration of “Made in L.A.” at the Hammer Museum, Mahinay is presenting with Make Room at Frieze Los Angeles with pieces that are the culmination of a decade-long process of rigorous studio experimentation. Working across multiple materials, her practice probes embodiment, perception and material consciousness.
Moving fluidly at the intersection of gestural abstraction and phenomenological inquiry, and deliberately inhabiting the threshold between abstraction and figuration, her work is, in both process and presence, a sustained meditation on embodiment and material consciousness. It touches something at the core of our encounter with the world, resonating across cognitive, emotional and imaginative dimensions. When Observer caught up with Mahinay ahead of Frieze, she explained that during her early explorations, as she searched for a conceptual foundation for her work, she was deeply drawn to memento mori and still-life painting. These references shaped her earliest output, which included still lifes but quickly expanded beyond conventional pictorial boundaries into hybrid objects recalling Rauschenberg’s combines, in which painted elements pushed outward into space and assumed sculptural form.
That became the foundation of her sustained interest in the tension between painting as a physical object and painting as an illusory window—an essential dialectic at the core of abstraction that animates her entire practice. “That’s a conversation I think abstraction takes on—the physicality of painting, and either the embracing or negation of painting as this space to enter,” she reflected. Over time, these questions became less literal and more materially embedded, as she no longer felt compelled to represent them directly. Her subsequent experimentation with fabric marked a decisive shift, allowing her to collapse the expanded sculptural field of the combine works back into a surface that was technically two-dimensional yet still retained a palpable tactile depth. Working primarily with sewn silk for nearly a decade, she explored varying degrees of transparency while deliberately exposing stretcher bars and structural supports, using these elements to probe painting’s underlying architecture and to question, more fundamentally, what constitutes painting itself.
A sustained engagement with surface gradually led Mahinay to conceive of the image as something almost wearable—something that could be tried on, like an identity or provisional state of being. “There was this kind of acknowledgement with painting and surface as an agreement between myself and the viewer,” she said. In the 10 years she spent working with fabrics, she also found herself rediscovering color through the process of dyeing, which she experienced as fundamentally different from applying pigment. “I think I fell in love with color again,” she said, reflecting on how this renewed relationship with chromatic depth and material presence ultimately led her back to oil painting, with a heightened awareness of color’s alchemical potential to transform tactile matter into imaginative and poetic universes.
Her latest paintings emerged out of techniques rooted in classical underpainting, beginning with earth-sourced pigments—burnt sienna, burnt umber and Dutch brown—that establish a chromatic foundation she activates through responsive gestures. It’s a highly traditional process, much closer to 16th-century landscape or figurative painting than to modern abstraction. “I use burnt umbers and burnt siennas in a single wash, then wipe away the lights and darks to create contrast and establish a sense of figure-ground. It creates a baseline color for the painting,” she explained. This initial stage unfolds quickly and intuitively, as she must work within a limited window of time to shape these tonal relationships before the surface settles. There are no preparatory sketches, predetermined plans or color studies; each painting emerges organically, guided by a responsive dialogue with previous works or gestures she may choose to extend or resist as the process unfolds.
From that initial underpainting, she applies a thin wash of titanium or lead white. When white is layered over brown, it produces an optical color-mixing effect historically associated with painters such as Caravaggio, whose subtle tonal transitions evoke the sensation of light passing through space. The interaction generates unexpected chromatic shifts—soft blues, pinks and purples—that the eye registers as atmospheric depth rather than literal pigment. “For me, it produces a familiarity that the eye associates with looking through atmosphere, with light passing through space and reflecting back. Your brain completes the color. It often results in soft pinks, blues or purples,” Mahinay said. For her, this is the alchemy of painting. “You can create something entirely new from two very different colors. Burnt sienna is this bright orange, and then you layer white over it, and suddenly it produces these soft, hazy blues. It feels like magic.”
In this first intuitive and gestural phase, Mahinay channels a spontaneous form of transmission onto the canvas, which she said might include the influence of her mother, a psychiatric nurse practitioner who incorporated somatic practices such as dance into her therapeutic work. “I do believe that movement and gesture carry your experience through it,” she said. “That’s part of how I trust the process—that I know I’m funneling or channeling something.”
After this initial stage, however, the process slows considerably, as she allows each layer to dry fully in order to preserve its chromatic balance. Each painting develops through a prolonged and highly individualized relationship, often accumulating density over time and undergoing substantial chromatic and structural shifts. Certain works transform dramatically in palette and identity as she responds to the painting’s internal logic and emerging presence. “I think I’m drawing from traditions that are about observing and looking and combining them with traditions of gesture and more intuitive mark-making, and a more all-over kind of impact on the surface,” she reflected.
The final painting emerges from this sustained dialogue with the surface—one that resists closure and remains open to interpretation. Mahinay is quick to point out that her paintings are not intended to communicate specific personal narratives. “I don’t expect anyone to pull away anything about me necessarily from the canvas,” she said, while nonetheless acknowledging that lived experience filters into the work. “Everything that I experience and absorb ends up in the work somehow.” In that sense, her canvases are both a record of experience and an inquiry into how perception emerges through the body, how surfaces hold memory and how internal emotional states take external form.
Her paintings have often been open-ended, but in this new body of work, she introduces a self-imposed form of containment: a translucent grid with shimmering lines of light vertically traversing the canvas, operating both as a formal device and philosophical proposition. More lush and vigorous painterly currents spill beyond this grid, as if exceeding the symbolic systems humans have devised to contain the inherently entropic nature of the cosmos and of our own psyche, suspended between imagination and the subconscious.
This confrontation with the increasingly dematerialized nature of experience, and the attempt to re-embody perception through material form, extends into the ceramic sculptural presences in the presentation. Developed at Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, Mahinay’s anthropomorphic forms are suspended in a fluid, amorphous state—unfinished lower-body fragments positioned in states of repose. “I wanted that body language to reflect a state of observing or receiving or meditating or taking pause,” she said. In their unresolved condition, these bodies seem to inhabit what the poetics of the Informel defined as the domain of the shapeless—not as an absence of form, but as form in continuous emergence, resisting closure and fixed classification.
Mahinay’s turn to ceramics grew out of a desire to extend the scale and spatial presence she had previously explored into a new material register, supported by the technical resources and collaborative environment available to her. At Frieze, the sculptures are accompanied by disjointed arms holding glass mirrors, preserving a trace of a human presence while underscoring their fragmentation. At the same time, the raw quality of their tactile surfaces retains the immediacy of the artist’s touch, engaging clay as one of humanity’s ancestral materials. Suspended between artifact and apparition, these sculptures surface like contemporary archaeological remnants charged with temporal ambiguity. In their heightened sensual materiality, they stand as quiet acts of resistance against the progressive virtualization of experience at this late stage of civilization. What they ultimately foreground is the irreducible condition of embodied experience—a phenomenological choreography that remains at the core of Mahinay’s practice, where making and sensing unfold as one continuous, reciprocal act.
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