Luis Edgar Mejicanos “Hypermnesia” and Madeline Donahue “Strange Magic”

Hesse Flatow

[Image: Luis Edgar Mejicanos "Oreja Mia" (2022) oil on canvas, 10 x 8 in.]

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HESSE FLATOW presents two simultaneous solo exhibitions: Hypermnesia by Luis Edgar Mejicanos and Strange Magic by Madeline Donahue.

At the heart of Mejicanos’ narrative-driven works is a fascination with painting and its potent ability to convey and elicit emotion. Grief is frequently at the forefront, partly due to the artist’s experience with loss in his own life, which he processes by casting himself as well as members of his family into hypothetical, dream-like vignettes. Hypermnesia, or as the philosopher Paolo Virno describes, “an increasing mnestic capacity following a crisis,” underscores his painterly approach, which begins in a haze of memory and fictive imagination, and gradually focuses or even factualizes alongside each meticulously rendered detail.[1]

Influenced by the work of literary figures such as Jorge Luis Borges, Octavia Butler, and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as the iconographic conventions of Early Netherlandish and Northern Italian Renaissance portraiture, Mejicanos builds his compositions with his singular lexicon of allegorical imagery, striking a careful balance between intrigue and intelligibility. From anthropomorphized binoculars and smoke detectors who tearfully lament and sweat with anxiety, to back bracesand band-aids whose wearers may possess a certain healing agency. These devices not only introduce humor as a kind of pressure release valve, easing a solemnity in tone, but also an element of science fiction, catapulting his works into an otherworldly, remedial place. Within this theoretical framework, Mejicanos enacts, confronts, and copes with feelings of loss that are often too difficult to put into words, counteracting precipitated absences and unknowns through generative scenes that appear uncannily real.

Hypermnesia brings together a recent group of paintings that collectively play with the notion of the gaze, whether through the frame of surveilling devices such as camcorders and hearing aids that heighten one’s perception, or from the standpoint of actors, portrayed or otherwise, who observe each other from across the room. For Mejicanos, this form of spying is less associated with ominous undertones of voyeuristic watching, and rather more in alignment with a protective watching over, a hallmark of a nurturing parent, guardian, or the spirit of a departed loved one.

Luis Edgar Mejicanos (b. 1995) was born and raised in Miami, FL. He graduated from Fordham University in 2018 with a dual degree in Visual Arts and Art History, and attended the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art in the summer of 2018. Mejicanos has attended residencies including the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY and Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. He is the recipient of the James Storey Painting Award from Fordham University and the Ellen Battell Stoeckle Fellowship from Yale University. His work has been exhibited in New York, Miami and Connecticut.

Madeline Donahue (b. 1983, Houston, TX) makes paintings, drawings and ceramics that center on her experiences of pregnancy, birth, motherhood, and owning a postpartum body. Her practice focuses on the surreal reality, physicality, emotionality and interdependence of these experiences. Intimacy is at the core of all of her work, addressing the simultaneous existence of abject and sublime facets implicit in the relationship with her children and body. These explorations detail these experiences – working through the isolation, fatigue, failure, anxiety, and joys of parenting.

Donahue’s solo exhibitions include “Live Wire” with Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami; “Fun House” with Praise Shadows Gallery, Boston; and “Attachments” with Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in New York. She has exhibited extensively with galleries and museums across the US and UK including Johansson Projects (Oakland, CA), Lauren Powell Projects (Los Angeles, CA), HESSE FLATOW (New York, NY), Deanna Evans Projects (Brooklyn, NY), and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA). Residencies include The Wassaic Project, Byrdcliffe Artist Colony, Artshack Ceramic Residency and Interlude Artist’s Residency in Livingston, NY. Donahue’s work has been reviewed in The Guardian, Hyperallergic, and Elephant Magazine. Interviews include Sound + Vision Podcast, I Like Your Work Podcast, and Artist Mother Podcast. She recently participated in “A Conversation on Alice Neel, Art, and Motherhood” facilitated by Lauren Palmor, assistant curator of American art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Donahue holds a BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (Boston, MA) and MFA from Brooklyn College (Brooklyn, NY).