Erica Mahinay – Rhythms

T293 is pleased to announce Rhythms, Erica Mahinay’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in its new space at Piazza del Catalone. Featuring twenty-four intimate works, the exhibition invites viewers to engage closely with subtle variations in hue, line, and form.

Erica Mahinay’s practice consistently foregrounds the trace of touch, generating a kind of “body language” through processes of accumulation and erasure. Her work oscillates between legibility and dissolution, sustaining an intentional instability of meaning that parallels the continually revised and contingent nature of lived experience.

In Rhythms, hands and gestures appear only as traces—mirroring a presence that becomes suddenly vibrant. The exhibition unfolds as a composition of movement and intervals where colors drift, and irregular, sinuous lines suggest paths for intuition to follow. These works act as thresholds or “sites of attunement,” where looking becomes a full-body experience. Meaning remains fluid as images echo and reconfigure themselves across the panels, inviting a state of heightened sensitivity.

The exhibition suggests a structural affinity with the “atmospheric attunement” described by Kathleen Stewart. Much like Stewart’s exploration of the fleeting intensities that define the everyday, Mahinay’s work prompts a “sensing out” of the environment. Her use of translucency, sheen, and porosity reveals an engagement with the body’s inherent awareness, where hands and gestures manifest only through their traces—mirroring a presence that suddenly makes itself vibrant. What has just been continues to resonate, while the “now” speaks with its full affective force.

Or, from another angle, this temporal depth finds a parallel in the rhythmic sensibilities of Olivier Messiaen. The exhibition unfolds as a composition of movements and intervals; irregular, sinuous lines traverse the surfaces like sequences to be followed, echoing the pulse and repetition found in complex musical structures. Colors drift and merge into potential relations, reaching toward the viewer like an extending hand before dissolving into a shifting cascade of shades and shadows.

In Mahinay’s process-driven approach, painting functions as a record of physical choreography. Built upon a classical foundation using earth-sourced pigments to establish its foundational underpainting, the work is transformed through responsive gestures— pressing, smearing, and wiping— that create a “limbic resonance” within its abstraction. Transparent washes allow underlying layers to shimmer through, balancing material presence with visually permeable space.

Mahinay joins in a mystic conjuring of substance and offers paintings that operate as thresholds or “sites of attunement.” The viewer is invited into a state of heightened sensitivity, moving through glimpsed scenes where meaning remains fluid and contingent. Looking becomes a corporeal encounter, as images seem to reverse, echo, and reconfigure themselves across the panels in a continuous, living flow.