DIEGO MEDINA
I will return
oil on linen
58 x 48 in.
2025
smoke the moon proudly presents Shew Stone, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Diego Medina (Piro-Manso-Tiwa). The gallery will present Medina’s new body of oil paintings on linen throughout the main gallery space. Scrying the natural world, Medina’s paintings translate something transcendent and essential about the land. Shew Stone marks the artist’s first solo show with the gallery. Medina has previously exhibited work at The Armory Show in New York with smoke the moon. His work is currently on view at SITE Santa Fe as part of the 12th SITE Santa Fe International.
The borderlands landscape of southern New Mexico is often the focus of Medina’s landscapes. Medina, who was born and raised in Las Cruces, New Mexico, often returns to sites of personal and regional significance in his work. Land has always been a marker: of both where we are and where we’ve been. The work in Shew Stone expounds on the 7 paintings Medina debuted at the SITE International, each representing a station of the cross. Mesas and grasslands become a threshold for an enduring journey. The land’s mark serves as a touchpoint to something much greater – a realm where the soul may wander sovereign.
Medina filters these cosmological depths through a devotion to color and aura in his paintings. Heaven is rendered new again, seen on earth in hues that seem to carry their own internal light. A cadmium red sunset flows out from brooding and thick skies. Hazy fuschias and ochres illuminate the edges of the sky. Medina’s palette blends something seen and something felt about the landscape that raised him. Awe lands in the body. Throughout this series of works, Medina invokes the power of the land as a self-renewing force. His paintings become a medium for rapture, their tonal range igniting a new horizon.
Sometimes we need tools to lengthen our sight, objects that serve as looking glasses: either mirror or portal, the small object carries a weight—a gateway to the unconscious. The shew stone leads back to the renaissance figure John Dee, a mathematician, astronomer and mystic whose scrying and divining practice revolved around his shew stone, allegedly Montezuma’s obsidian mirror. For Dee, the stone was the center: uniting the heavenly world with the earthly and filtering divine messages. A conclave of angels being called down through a small and daily object.
Inside the paintings in Shew Stone there is a slit in the earth where all beauty and terror pours down. A drop of water equal to a raging river in their spiritual power. Medina stations his landscapes to filter this omniscient presence, reminding us of what the land has always been: enduring divinity.