An extensive overlaying of pigments covers the gallery’s exhibition space like an expansive wave that irradiates from the artworks of this project. This clear imprint of the work that the artist has been realizing over the past few weeks, beyond accentuating the immersive character of her painting style, turns the viewer into a witness of her exhaustive production process. With this gesture, the artist’s habitual hermeticism she tends to work with from her studio is vulnerated, raising a series of underlying topics in her work that have not yet been posted in such an open manner. The project has a total duration of four months and is divided into 3 stages: Departure, Limbo, and Transfiguration.

The 3 distinct phases clearly allude to Joseph Campbell’s hero myth: The hero departs toward a new adventure, its initiation, and finally, the hero’s return to their village as a transformed being and the conflict this entails.

This archetypical structure is shared in multiple cultures’ narratives and seized by Montiel to explore her own journey.

An initiatory journey tangled with deep thresholds and existential questions. The search for the sublime merges with a partial understanding of psychedelics, botanical studies, sexuality, the cosmos, science, shamanism, paganism, love, or nostalgia for a nomadic past. The artist works on the idea of myth under a Jungian tradition: as a psychic phenomenon that reveals the soul’s nature.

Initiation reminds us that we are in continuous transformation, praising and magnifying it through the use of symbols and perceptual stimuli. It helps us question what we know and to stop denying other kinds of wisdom. To open ourselves up to other possibilities of being without acting condescendingly toward what we do not understand, what we do not want to see or are terrified to accept.

In a permanent search, Ana Montiel will continue working in the gallery’s exhibition space throughout the 3 stages, fading all traces of their beginning or end. In constant recalibration, mimicking the Earth’s magnetic poles. The artist visualizes her journey through a misty walk as a circular river, which its grooves generously widen at each turn.

Text by Enrique Giner de los Ríos

Beneath this threshold I wait for the things I thought I was and the things I thought I needed to dissolve. My ideas, dogmas and beliefs crumble and give way to something different. Here I await what I can become. I advance through the opaque mist of this forest of fictions, with perseverance and compassion.

This transition is a state without a fixed form; like the magnetic pole of the Earth, in constant self-questioning, in constant recalibration. This is a journey in the shape of a circular river, which makes the groove deeper with each pass.

I build a bridge to the interior. I silence my reflection in the other as I take distance. I try to avoid mirrors or social conditionings. Crossing the bridge, it only remains to continue going forward through the undergrowth, until reaching the lighthouse inside.


Ana Montiel
Mexico City, 2022

The pictorial work of this first stage of Initiation (Departure) has a personal dimension of mirroring and reflecting with a past self. More specifically, myself from spring of 2018, when during an artistic residency in New York, I began producing artworks with this granular technique (entoptic), as an analogy of the uncertain mist of human perception.

My intention for the first stage of Initiation was to produce a series of diptychs that unsuccessfully sought symmetry, to demonstrate the impossibility of a mirror without distortion, be it the mirror of one with oneself, of one with another being, of one with its environment, etc.

The phenomenology of human experience is a subjective game disguised as impartiality. Our programming is a distorted mirror that keeps enveloping us.

I feel that trying to reconnect with the Ana from spring of 2018, completes a lap around the circular river that I mentioned before, to then continue moving forward, with the intention of inaugurating another cycle.

In the works you see here I have prioritized trying to capture the strength of their production process instead of trying to achieve certain perfection in the final result. These paintings may not be as meticulous as some past ones, but they are definitely freer.

Ana Montiel

Initiation: Departure at an early stage of its progress.

The four diptychs for Departure have a different letter in their name as a reference to theologian Raimon Panikkar’s explanation of human experience:

“What we call experience (E) is a combination of personal experience, which is ineffable, unique each time and foreign to repetition (e), conveyed by our memory (m), modeled by our imagination (i), and conditioned by its reception (r) in the cultural context of our time.”

             Initiation: Departure (r) 1/2, 2022
                150x120cm - Acrylic on canvas

        Initiation: Departure (m) 1/2, 2022
            220x150cm - Acrylic on canvas

“By elucidating the underlying metaphoric structures — which have been variously referred to as archetypes, deep structures, or primordial images — we are uncovering something of humanity's common language.”

Ralph Metzner (The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience)

                Initiation: Transfiguration (Think That You Are Everywhere at Once, on Land, at Sea, in Heaven) 3, 2022                                                                     Acrylic on canvas. 150x400 cm / 59.05 x 157.48 inches (two panels).

INITIATION: SEPARATION (Symphony No.3, Op. 36 - III. Lento - Cantabile semplice) #3, 2021

INITIATION: SEPARATION (Symphony No.3, Op. 36 - III. Lento - Cantabile semplice) #5 displayed with a sculpture by Jose Dávila

Now we wake
after a lifelong reverie
only to find a threshold that unveils more uncertainty



a line becoming a point
(speaking a tongue without tense)



a wave becoming a circle
(circular time being unveiled)



a blurred portal making us lose sight of ourselves
(an unexpected initiation)



Ana Montiel, 2019

an initiation, a rare conjunction, an opening into ourselves

(this)
a threshold blurred beyond recognition
what I thought I was and what I think I am are the same
delusions projected.

(now)
an intention, a step forward, a floating emotion rising to the surface
we all being and becoming
never not changing.

(us)
holding hands while we waltz into the unknown 
any definition will only become fiction.



Ana Montiel, 2019