Adriel Visoto, Beatrice Arraes,
Kayla Risko, Paola Oxoa, Sebatián Hidalgo
POSTCARDS
March 19 – April 23, 2026
To send a postcard is to acknowledge, without apology or irony, that lived experience cannot be transmitted. The readymade image on the front fixedly declares what is worth your attention; the unconcealed message on the back—a few lines of goodwill or happy anecdotes—catches the hand behind it mid-fiction, sender and recipient equally undeceived. Legible to any random passerby, self-conscious by design, they are perhaps more perfect distillations of human expression than we give these minor souvenirs credit for. The passing thought, the generic-if-lovely view, the quotidian greeting—these instances are what we send loved ones across borders and time, knowing the gap between us can never fully close. A fleeting sentiment arrested: “I was here; I thought of you; look at this; remember me.”
Gathered at MAMA Projects, the five artists in Postcards—Adriel Visoto, Beatrice Arraes, Kayla Risko, Paola Oxoa, and Sebastián Hidalgo—present diminutive paintings, their works attesting to existent inner worlds without explaining them: glimpses of domestic spaces, unnamed persons, energetic states, places remembered or imagined or hovering liminally between the two. These works ask to be leaned into and studied, rewarding prolonged proximity with pentimenti and other confidences. While each artist shares some personal relationship or familial connection to Latin America and its diaspora, the exhibition resists the pull toward a unified narrative. These are not dispatches from a single place but a collection of gestures from different hands and geographies, bound not by native tongues but by a shared commitment to work that treats the fragment not as a concession but as the only honest account.
Adriel Visoto (b. 1987, Brazil) builds narratives from private photographic archives where records blur into autofiction, rendered in eerie, saturated monochromes. An anonymous figure slumped on a green-lit New York City subway bench—waiting, sleeping, or simply stopped. Hopperesque in its urban isolation, invoking sonder: the outsider's exhaustion hidden beneath the city's polished playground; the story we don't send.
Beatrice Arraes (b. 1998, Brazil) approaches painting both additively and subtractively, layered paint obscuring itself while incisions excavate what lies beneath—a technical process that generates an archaeological stratigraphy of image and memory. Her works act as impressionist rememberings: blurry reconstructions that, like memory itself, disclose different details with each viewing, their organic contours and sharp contrasts revealing less the scene depicted than the emotional residue that remains.
Kayla Risko's (b. 1986, USA) figures exist at a remove—from the sea they face but do not enter, from the rooms they occupy but do not fill, from the viewer who cannot see their face. A fiction drawn from daily life: the same unnamed woman, caught at different moments and stages across many canvases. Dressed in yellow on a porch; sitting cross-legged on a floor with books; in blue slippers holding a baby: each painting its own world, the outside implied but unreachable, the chairs empty, the hours unknown. Enough detail to produce intimacy, but not enough to dissolve distance; the viewer becomes a voyeur, peering at a private moment they may witness but never possess.
Paola Oxoa (b. 1979, Colombia) has spent over a decade in private obsession with a single geometric form—radial, mysterious, graphic, perpetually in flux. Each painting is an index of the porous energetic entanglement between body, mind, and environment at the moment of making. The pulsing linear forms reveal motion beneath stillness, signaling that the artist's somatic and psychic conditions had already shifted by the moment of their capture.
Sebastián Hidalgo (b. 1985, Mexico) bridges mysticism, psychedelia, and cyber-aesthetics in an eclectic and mutable pictorial world where metaphysical planes converge in washed-out palettes, sci-fi comic logic, and notebook-casual linework. Leaping cats, a head split open to the cosmos, a tree growing from nothing, stacked grid-like architectural forms that recall both the vacuous space-time continuum and cube-storage units: the psychic void rendered universal, darkly funny, and unresolved.
To encounter the works in Postcards is to read over someone's shoulder, glimpsing a secret: a message from afar, never quite meant for you, that finds you anyway.
— Daniela Mayer
Gathered at MAMA Projects, the five artists in Postcards—Adriel Visoto, Beatrice Arraes, Kayla Risko, Paola Oxoa, and Sebastián Hidalgo—present diminutive paintings, their works attesting to existent inner worlds without explaining them: glimpses of domestic spaces, unnamed persons, energetic states, places remembered or imagined or hovering liminally between the two. These works ask to be leaned into and studied, rewarding prolonged proximity with pentimenti and other confidences. While each artist shares some personal relationship or familial connection to Latin America and its diaspora, the exhibition resists the pull toward a unified narrative. These are not dispatches from a single place but a collection of gestures from different hands and geographies, bound not by native tongues but by a shared commitment to work that treats the fragment not as a concession but as the only honest account.
Adriel Visoto (b. 1987, Brazil) builds narratives from private photographic archives where records blur into autofiction, rendered in eerie, saturated monochromes. An anonymous figure slumped on a green-lit New York City subway bench—waiting, sleeping, or simply stopped. Hopperesque in its urban isolation, invoking sonder: the outsider's exhaustion hidden beneath the city's polished playground; the story we don't send.
Beatrice Arraes (b. 1998, Brazil) approaches painting both additively and subtractively, layered paint obscuring itself while incisions excavate what lies beneath—a technical process that generates an archaeological stratigraphy of image and memory. Her works act as impressionist rememberings: blurry reconstructions that, like memory itself, disclose different details with each viewing, their organic contours and sharp contrasts revealing less the scene depicted than the emotional residue that remains.
Kayla Risko's (b. 1986, USA) figures exist at a remove—from the sea they face but do not enter, from the rooms they occupy but do not fill, from the viewer who cannot see their face. A fiction drawn from daily life: the same unnamed woman, caught at different moments and stages across many canvases. Dressed in yellow on a porch; sitting cross-legged on a floor with books; in blue slippers holding a baby: each painting its own world, the outside implied but unreachable, the chairs empty, the hours unknown. Enough detail to produce intimacy, but not enough to dissolve distance; the viewer becomes a voyeur, peering at a private moment they may witness but never possess.
Paola Oxoa (b. 1979, Colombia) has spent over a decade in private obsession with a single geometric form—radial, mysterious, graphic, perpetually in flux. Each painting is an index of the porous energetic entanglement between body, mind, and environment at the moment of making. The pulsing linear forms reveal motion beneath stillness, signaling that the artist's somatic and psychic conditions had already shifted by the moment of their capture.
Sebastián Hidalgo (b. 1985, Mexico) bridges mysticism, psychedelia, and cyber-aesthetics in an eclectic and mutable pictorial world where metaphysical planes converge in washed-out palettes, sci-fi comic logic, and notebook-casual linework. Leaping cats, a head split open to the cosmos, a tree growing from nothing, stacked grid-like architectural forms that recall both the vacuous space-time continuum and cube-storage units: the psychic void rendered universal, darkly funny, and unresolved.
To encounter the works in Postcards is to read over someone's shoulder, glimpsing a secret: a message from afar, never quite meant for you, that finds you anyway.
— Daniela Mayer