Lila de Magalhaes

"Soft and pulsing,

we knotted ourselves at the center of the earth,

a coupling of flesh, silken debris, and soil.

Orifices for eyes, we bent there writhing,

hot and amorphous,

to the rhythms of our own undulation.

It was ecstasy in chaos,

a darkness we could taste,

sensuousness that slipped indiscriminately.

And all the while an elation so pure in its decadence,

it felt like a homecoming,

so we dug ourselves deep in the dampness and dreamed."

Born of the earth, there is an inherent tension in being both body and mind. The absurd embodiment of some primal experiment and its transcendence, and with it the desire to both sink back into corporeality and shed our skins. Lila de Magalhaes highlights these sites of rupture as a means to address the complex confluence of one’s interior world and external conditions. Working across a range of materials the artist charts territories in constant flux, as diffuse narratives trace worms, women, and stars through various states of duress, delirium, and abandon.

Involuntary Earthing, speaks both to the show’s title and de Magalhaes’s new series of tile works—discrete modular scenes whose changeable arrangements plot chance encounters and continuums. Produced during a residency at Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico, these works are drawn from the dampness of the earth in material and form, as worms tunnel and twitch across the surface invoking both primordial source and entrails.

This interest in interiority translates to de Magalhaes’s ceramic reliefs. Teeming with sinuous beings, these Interiors couple the relationship between private space and the privacy of the mind. A female figure lounges blissfully in the bath, while a worm-like avatar gazes in the mirror—a role reversed in Interior (Dysmorphia is a pretty name) (2022), an encounter at once ghastly and relatably deflating. Awash with red glaze, these domestic environs pulse as though the subterranean mind were a physical soil: a terrain perpetually occupied, agitated, and metabolized.

Such incessant introspection is both intensely personal and a product of external forces, as the psychological creates yet another seam between one’s physical reality and dreams of transcendence. These unbridled desires take shape through Magalhaes’s monumental perfume bottles—vessels which seek to play with and promote experiences beyond the body. Decadent in their dark humor and indulgence, these works articulate the luxury of release and with it, an unbinding of the self.

Embroideries such as Litha (2022) and Lunch Date (2022) envision this ultimate surrender, an expression that living unabashedly can be at once celebration and discord. Joy and strangeness overflow these bacchanalian scenes—chaos breeds pleasure, organisms gorge, and the sky drops drunkenly to earth. In Ride Home (2022), a woman crawls to a stream, which carries in its rush a small house. Ridden by an emotional firmament, her tears intermingle with the winding waters below. Here, finally, she is home.

—ЯK

Lila de Magalhaes (b. 1986, Rio de Janiero) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from the University of Southern California in 2013 and a BA from Glasgow School of Art in 2008.

Her recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Palace of Errors, Deli Gallery, NY; Soup of the Night, Matthew Brown, LA; Cupid of Chaos, Ghebaly Gallery, LA; A Soft Flea, Mutt. R, LA; Remote Control, Abode, LA; Exhibition (10), SPF15, San Diego; and Motorfruit, Blood Gallery, NY. She has appeared as well in numerous group exhibitions, including Porch Gallery, Ojai; Company Gallery, NY; Freedman Fitzpatrick, LA; François Ghebaly, LA; ltd los angeles, LA; Steve Turner, LA, Pane Project, Milan; Julius Caesar, Chicago; and 356 Mission, LA.