There is something profoundly physical, almost primordial, that characterizes the Guadalajara-born, Los Angeles-based artist’s work Carmen Argote. Materiality and sensitivity are at the heart of her practice, which is an exercise in navigating the physical and emotional interplay that accompanies our relationship with the world. In her upcoming show on Silverlens in New York, “Soft Perimeter,” her gradients of red pigments are as vivid in their tangibility as they are visceral in tonal depth—the body, re-embodied. Argota gets its color from cochineal, a scaly insect in the suborder Sternorrhyncha from which natural carmine has traditionally been produced. One of the oldest pigments used in the Americas, dating back to the second century BC, its vibrant color was symbolic of the gods, the sun, and blood. The Mayans, Aztecs, and indigenous groups in Oaxaca and Tlaxcala used the insects, known in Nahuatl as nocheztli, to paint murals, color sacred codices, and dye textiles. When the Spanish arrived, they established an extractive and highly profitable trade, sending tons of dried insects across the Atlantic to color European royal clothing and paintings. For Argote, it is a material that embodies the human and natural histories of extraction, as well as their entanglements.
Everything in the show speaks of transformation and the alchemical processes through which matter passes between states. Argote’s engagement with cochineal came after experimenting with onions and other natural dyes, she tells the Observer. While developing As Above, So Below, her 2020 exhibition at the New Museum, she was working with citrus fruits, citric acid and fruit trees, thinking about how one substance can transform another in nature. Cochineal came naturally into that investigation: “I was very interested in how one thing could influence another. That’s how I came to cochineal. I liked its vibrancy and that orange color.”
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“Soft perimeter“ |
Her connection to body and sensation, however, only emerged when she began to bring it to a more monumental scale, with a site-specific installation, Me at the Marketfirst presented at the Center for Visual Arts around 2019. There, a monumental piece of textile suspended from above was set by a series of coquina dye casts, into which Argote poured lemon juice. The process produced rectilinear marks that fell to the surface like a waterfall, eventually settling and accumulating in a natural pool within pockets sewn into the material and across the painting on the floor. “The work includes the relationship between the vertical and the horizontal, the action of the pour and the line produced through gravity, and the shifts and changes that occurred,” she explains. “It was for alchemy.”
Some of that work is in the Silverlens show; its title came from a “meat market” sign she encountered while walking, an activity that has long been central to her artistic practice, Argote recounts. The phrase had raised questions about who or what is “on the market”: the artist, the artwork, or both. After the original installation, she decided to cut the paper into pieces as “meat cuts”, allowing the work to continue beyond its site-specific form and eventually enter the art market.
Through repeated treatment and layering, the coquina accumulated in a thick, geological, rock-like sedimentation on the surface of the linen. That geological temporality opened up in a corporeal way, according to the artist: “In our bodies, experiences can also harden or build us. This began to connect the work back to the body. The alchemical processes of lemon and cocaine become metaphors for different bodily sensations.”
The vivid red in her New York pieces is often punctuated by orange, purple, hematoma-like areas and earthy brown tones, as if the surfaces were bruised, rooted, formed, or simply developing. It is no coincidence that the titles of textile assemblies, Yes, the basket of fire, Nuclear bloom, Rest of the Flame and the bigger Warm calls, Match stick AND Please put out the fireas well as the monumental work on paper where is the match that shone the whole fieldit relates them to the destructiveness of fire, but also to its transformative, catastrophic and potentially regenerative power.
In her newer works, Argote uses cochineal to simultaneously think about solidification and softening, as seen in more corporeal wall sculptures made from organic materials and found joined and knotted. Similar to cocoons or mummies, they evoke the body not as a stable entity, but as something subject to inevitable, continuous, internal and external transformations. She imagines paint as “almost like a body,” behaving similarly to “all kinds of secretions, like hormones and different chemicals, which change and alter our moods.”
This becomes even more powerful in monumental works on paper such as where is the match that shone the whole field and a similar earlier work she showed at the Hammer Museum. As she made them, Argote says, she was surprised by the sensory experience. “I thought, ‘These insect bodies are really resonating.'” The sheets in her studio looked like a fiery landscape, and she “could feel how the insect bodies were telling me something about the sensations inside my body, also connecting those sensations to the landscape. I began to think about what it would mean to show these large works in a gallery of resonance. the insect bodies, their transformations and their resonance to continue.”
In these works, Argote invites the viewer to experience a similar reorientation around the soft perimeter of our experiential field—an exercise in re-embodiment of sensation through which we can understand how bodies, memories, and systems of power are embedded in physical space. “With the linen work and the soft perimeter, the softness is also architecture. I think about the spaces that contain us and shelter us,” she explains. We are also invited to embrace the essential porosity of those perimeters. It asks us to move through the world as filtering membranes in constant dialogue with a wider and entangled system, rather than as separate and isolated monads, despite the illusion of the individual ego constructed over the course of Western civilization. “I think it’s more that the perimeter is malleable. With soft sculpture, I realized it was architecture. It could trace the shape of a space or take on a new shape. It could become a soft shape that allows for other possibilities.”
Argote has created its own ecosystem, both in its studio and in each of its exhibitions. A stuffed, snake-like textile sculpture at the entrance, The soft perimeter of the house (2026), charts a domestic interior and the tangled relationships that unfold within the hybrid home and studio she shares with her mother, who often collaborates with her on linen-based works, and a handful of chickens, who also serve as collaborators. Specifically, she describes her relationship with the work as collaborative. “I’ve often wondered if I think of art as an external entity. That’s possible,” she reflects. “I also think of it as a collective fit, like a radio frequency we can tune into. Or it can be an aspect of myself that is recognized and can be integrated when I make the work. It can be both.”
She accepts the description of this practice as a form of channeling: “My body may be channeling a way of knowing, and I think it’s ancestral. It definitely moves through the women in my family, through our hands.” Argote, her mother, and her grandmother are all named Carmen, and she sees a lineage running through their hands.
In her world, materials possess their own forms of wisdom and expression. Cochineal and linen are not passive substances, but agents that shape the development of the work. Their behavior can redirect the artist, produce insights and reveal possibilities that were not present in the initial plan. Creating art is a conversation with something partially unknown: a frequency, a material intelligence, or an unknown part of yourself. “I truly believe that art knows more. Through conversation, art continues to teach me what it is. I’m often surprised by its agency, and I allow that agency to come forward,” she says.
Perhaps surprisingly, Argote has recently felt a growing desire to move toward action and embodied performance, and she developed a two-act performance for the New York show. The opening act of the exhibition involved Argote speaking directly to the works. She began with the phrase “This work said no,” asserting the agency of the objects, then moved from piece to piece in conversation with them. For the closing performance, she said she aimed to become more embodied and interact more physically with the works. “I’m thinking about what it means to do a performance in the context of a commercial gallery. How do we open and close a show? How does the work move from stillness while being reviewed in circulation?”
This will not replace making, which she understands as a private act and an intimate conversation between hands, body and material. Performance and object-making remain complementary, but Argote now thinks of the act of making itself as a performance, with the resulting artwork functioning as a documentation of that action and as a container for its energy or charge. Encountering a viewer can reactivate that charge, returning the work to a site of new potential and further performative acts. Her upcoming residencies at High Desert Test Sites and Art Farm in the Bay Area will support this turn toward performance, and she identifies this broader move toward embodied conversation with objects, materials, and space as the direction her work is currently taking. “I’m very interested in using the frequency I mentioned, allowing the artwork to teach me and be in conversation with it. The performance feels like a desire coming forward,” she says.
More at the exhibitions
