Liste 2025

Lodovico Corsini is pleased to share a solo presentation of works by Mexican artist Javier Barrios, comprising a large-scale sculpture and a series of watercolour paintings. This selection of works brings together new productions and bears witness to Barrios’ syncretic artistic practice and unique visual language. Indeed, Javier Barrios’ practice embraces a hallucinatory range of influences, weaving together botany, mysticism, geography, colonial narratives, art history, and creation myths. His work explores—amongst others—universal themes such as mankind’s relationship to nature, using phenomena including botanical colonialism and extractivism as a prism through which to examine our place within the world.

 In 1842, British physician Nathaniel Ward designed wooden and glass enclosures known as ‘Wardian cases,’ which became instrumental during the Victorian period for transporting exotic plants across imperial territories, sparking the first large-scale commercial and colonial plant trade. Javier Barrios has drawn inspiration from these historical terrariums, as well as from botanical illustration, natural history, and yokai (supernatural beings and spirits from Japanese folklore) to create a large sculpture, belonging to his Haunted Houses series. By replacing the greenhouse’s glass panels with thin paper upon which Barrios intricately draws a multitude of orchids morphing into demonic characters, the architecture becomes host to a fantastical scene. In a subaquatic landscape, Barrios challenges the fragile and delicate aura of the flowers, attributed by those who have sought for centuries to possess and domesticate them. Finally, from the top of the sculpture, a mantra-like text spreads in a watery script towards the orchids, welcoming viewers into the “house of the lord and of madness”.

 Surrounding the sculpture is a new series of framed watercolours titled Night Omens. Each panel depicts a species, hybridized by Barrios: akin to birds, reptiles, or orchids, they sing and caw as if announcing a dark prophecy. These creatures hang from cherry blossom branches in bloom, the plant’s flowers endowed with masks and hokai-inspired faces in a continuation of the artist’s series around themes of chaos and rebirth, as often depicted in Buddhist hell scrolls. The format, scale, and number of panels in turn refer to traditional Japanese and Mexican folding screens, this time conceived intently for the wall space.