The work of Mexican photographers Anayantzin Contreras and José Luis Rodriguez Ritte explores the tensions embodied by their country’s syncretic heritage: tensions between nature and culture, instinct and intellect, design and improvisation, the local and the global, history and contemporaneity.

In Contreras’ work, landscape becomes introspective, disembodied and ethereal, while natural forms are abstracted into line, texture and arcane geometry; Rodriguez Ritte explores idiosyncratic beauty without indulging in the narrow optics of the ethnographic gaze: the portrait is a convergence of personal and social truths, while architecture lays bare contradiction and paradox, but also imagination. Both artists focus on revealing the complexity and sophistication that, combined with a contemporary sensibility, reveal the adaptive, receptive nature of a culture in a constant state of renewal. “Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente.”

Curated by Gabriella Boschi Scott