ALEXIS MATA
‘Lost Landing’
Thinkspace Projects presents Lost Landing by Alexis Mata, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Through layered dichotomies of both ideas and mediums, Mata challenges conventional notions of wealth, beauty, and success. Blending personal experience with cosmological themes, his work explores the tension between good and evil, as well as the duality of the material and the spiritual.
Born in Mexico City, Mata bridges the social and political by confronting the violence and inequality embedded within his native home. Throughout his creative career, he has been drawn to distortion, exploring the concept across a wide range of media including collage, sculpture, and installation. Through these forms, Mata examines ideas of beauty and perception; however, rather than pushing further into distortion itself, he has chosen to move beyond it, opening new creative channels and embracing a process of spiritual renewal. His practice ultimately merges the classical with the contemporary, pairing traditional art-making techniques with the latest technology.
There was a moment when I was walking between forests and mountains in Tepoztlán, Mexico while dandelions floated across my face. I became deeply fascinated by the way they moved: the way their seeds dispersed through the air, traveling freely, pollinating on their own, and inhabiting new spaces. In that instant, I experienced a strange sensation, as if I were standing on another planet, in another time, confronted with an entirely new landscape.
From that experience, the idea of landing emerged. The exhibition is constructed as a new journey: the arrival into an unknown territory where forms, plants, and presences appear as though they belong to an imagined ecosystem. Landing functions as a metaphor for discovery, but also for reconnecting with the creative impulse and with the capacity for wonder.
The symbol of the dandelion runs throughout the exhibition as an image of expansion and transformation. I am interested in thinking about its seeds as ideas floating through the air: thoughts that move freely until someone catches them. There is something deeply poetic in the act of holding a dandelion suspended in the wind, making a wish, and allowing that wish to become reality. That fragility and movement were translated into the visual language of the works through gestures, compositions, and forms in constant motion.
In the same way, the cactus appears as a recurring presence within the exhibition: a kind of ambiguous, resistant, and autonomous organism capable of growing and reproducing wherever it chooses. More than a plant, it becomes a character inhabiting this imagined territory, a being that exists somewhere between the natural and the fantastical.
The exhibition ultimately proposes a space where forms seem to mutate, drift, and slowly colonize their surroundings. Each piece functions as the trace of an unknown landscape, a fragment of an expanding world where ideas disperse, float, and find new ways to grow.
About Alexis Mata:
Alexis Mata (b. 1981, Mexico City, MX) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersection of digital and analog mediums. His work has been exhibited widely in museums internationally including solo shows “Tiempo Vivo” at Museum of Tamaulipas in Mexico City and “Pensamientos Vagos” at the CECUT Museum Tijuana, as well as group shows “Strange Pathways“ at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California, “Mexico: Pintura Recreativa” at Carrilo Gill’s Art Museum in Mexico City, “Persistencia de la Memoria” at MUCA Rome Museum, Mexico City, “La raíz de mi falla” Exhibition Hall of Fine Arts, Puebla.