Mexican artist ANAMENA’s magical realism vacillates between wonder and fear. Her stylized paintings are often dominated by bold, monochromatic compositions featuring solitary figures, creating enigmatic scenes that are simultaneously magical and potentially terrifying, hanging somewhere between explicit and implicit meanings. ANAMENA shows a preference for economic natural subjects like plants and animals, whose uncanny simplicity imbues them with a threatening edge. Painstakingly rendered organic forms swoop elegantly, small animals sit plainly, engaging viewers’ gazes and imaginations.

Beyond ANAMENA’s scrupulous application and familiar subjects, secondary meanings lurk and pictorial harmony risks collapse. Cacti take on prickly, sensual connotations; quaint animals become uncanny omens; beautiful scenes appear on the verge of disaster. Exploring this sublime ledge between beauty and fear ANAMENA articulates visual puns, relishing double meanings attached to archetypal images. At what point, she seems to ask, do familiar symbols stop being attractive and become unnerving? In ANAMENA´S works the two no longer seem exclusive: her figures cling to the ledge between the elegant and the unnerving.