The work brought together by the group of artists proposed by La Balsa Arte for Zona Maco 2026 has, for us, characteristics of empathy and connection that establish cross-dialogues and linear temporal and spatial schemes. The short tour proposed touches on various aspects of contemporary practice, revealing cross-relationships here and there, and moving between nature, intimacy, materiality, and representation.

Beatriz Uribe’s meticulously crafted embroideries refer to an idea of mythical and ideal nature. Birds, foxes, horses, and other living beings populate forests and meadows; from a bird’s-eye view, landscapes such as those that make up the series ‘El oro no está donde lo buscan’ (Gold is not where you look for it) are represented. Her work reveals an enchanted world as well as a disenchantment with it. Trained as a marine biologist, she came to art through a rediscovery of traditional crafts, where an environmental critique lies behind her works—stories of a world in chaos.

Julián Burgos also addresses a theme of nature, in this case nature seen through the lens of Baroque history. Power and illusion, large scale, and the evocation of spectacle are some of the devices the artist uses to represent animals which, like fairy-tale creatures, reveal themselves as beings endowed with autonomy and consciousness. Rather than idealizing the wild, his work examines our relationship with living beings through a dramatic approach to light and shadow. Characteristically, his work reflects on the use of art to convey notions of power, as these living beings serve as allegorical figures representing ideas such as power, redemption, and human emotion.

Isabel Gómez Machado continues her exploration of notions conveyed through the idea—but not the idealization—of femininity. Her work began by reviewing family photo archives and later focused on analyzing the representation of femininity in film and music. She explores how Mexican cinema spread patriarchal notions of female roles, impacting social classes throughout Latin America and installing both idols and stereotypes of Latin American women in the popular imagination. In works such as Monogamia, she questions the theatricality of romantic love through popularly constructed signs, using the swan as a symbol of romance.

In a related but distinct approach, Priscilla González explores intimacy, femininity, and the everyday through a practice deeply influenced by feminist movements and a sensitivity toward the subtle and the erotic. Working with media such as paper, textiles, painting, and more recently ceramics, her work investigates how personal experience, domestic gestures, and material softness can function as political statements. By reclaiming the intimate as a space of agency, González questions normative structures and affirms the personal as political.

Unlike the others, Radenko Milak explores the meaning of the Anthropocene, analyzing how the images we construct and circulate redefine concepts such as city, urbanism, science, and modernity. His work unfolds as a loop that reflects the contemporary condition and our ways of inhabiting the world. Inspired by Giorgio Agamben, he argues that being contemporary means looking beyond the glare of the present in order to discover what is hidden in its shadow.

Ramon Laserna returns to drawing as a craft based on a de-historicisation of movements such as Latin American abstractionism and op art. Beyond a search for visual effects, his work is situated in the here and now, incorporating themes such as algorithms and chance, and the preeminence of human production and thought over digital creation and artificial intelligence. In this era, Laserna produces drawings of patterns, processes, and sequences that bear witness to infinite care and patience, giving rise to ideas of human error and resilience in contrast to the instantaneous, artificial, and soulless.

Magic, nature, gender, historicity, technique, intimacy, and relationships are some of the keys to approaching these individual universes, which are in reality multiverses within the kaleidoscope of contemporary art.