top of page

Germinal Forces in (Dis)Tension
The Paintings of Rebeca Segura

by Luis Fernando Quirós.

When I speak of the relational poetics (Glissant 2018) at work in Rebeca Segura’s art (Mexico, 1977)—her large-scale oil paintings on canvas—I must first affirm that the ontological core of her practice rests on the Nature/Culture binary, what we call the Environment.

Our continent, Abya Yala—its name before European colonization—has always been crisscrossed by migrants moving south to north and vice versa, and by navigators traversing its abundant oceans and seas. The indigenous peoples honored Mother Earth, the life-giver and midwife, as “Pachamama,” symbolized by the endless spiral: an abstracted form that, to those ancestors, was a coiled serpent ready to strike. This belief reminds us that when we assault or pollute our surroundings—whether by greenhouse gases from cars and factories, by widespread deforestation, or by relentless extractivism—the planet retaliates with sharpened fangs: global warming, hurricanes, wildfires, desertification, droughts, landslides, and other natural disasters.

​

Thus, the environment is simultaneously a landscape, a picture, a painting—a field of vectors.

By extractivism I mean the large-scale exploitation of natural resources for export—oil, mining, monocultures—what global trade theorists call “commodities” or enclave economies (Wagner 2025).

​

All this mass of (mis)information reveals that existence—and by extension contemporary life—is mapped by tensions and relationships: social ties, geopolitical forces, macroeconomic dynamics, biocultural realities layered with data. Like today’s microchip technology, these factors penetrate deeply; they are bundles of emergent planetary energies, each understood as a stratum that also underpins creative expression.

​

Rebeca Segura’s Recent Paintings

I assert all this because, in contemporary art—and especially in Segura’s current work—this repulsive force erupting from Earth’s entrails is the inner drive of an artist who embraces an abstraction that summons every living force of the planet. From the cave where a river is born in a mountain’s womb—a space where ancestral spirits stand guard and defend—we sense her deep connection to place.

Rooted in sacred geometry, her paintings draw on the continent’s original manifestations, as Vives Lorenzini and Solís have noted in their studies. Her strokes, gestures, overwritings, impastos, and fluid passages emerge from even more primordial sources: telluric forces and the waters of the world’s cave, where early artists once entered to leave their existential mark in rock art. Yet her canvases also unfold like Situationist maps of the 1960s—laden with signs, data, and (mis)information that reveal the city’s origins, its social structure, and the existential chasms we all carry on our backs.

 

Now, when I turn to stone, it’s important to say that stone—more than the earth and water our planet provides—is the true material origin of the universe. Stones exist on every planet, on moons, asteroids, and comets—those immense, unimaginable bodies careening into one another through outer space. As they break apart, they become millions of fragments of hard rock that unleash flashes of light and bursts of sound.

​

What draws me to Segura’s paintings are the visuo-perceptual nuances that communicate these incidental readings. All that matter swallowed by black holes—those toroidal, attractive forces—triggers a sign-making activity I perceive abundantly in the works under discussion.

Quantum physicists have studied this: in those cosmic collisions energy is released, heat is generated, and signs emerge that betray the approach of this Mexican woman artist in her paintings. This resonates with the flows of energy stirring the planet’s seas and atmospheres—or with the massive internal collisions and fractures of its layers and strata that, when they shatter, release energy as earth-shaking quakes. In those moments, the ancient warrior, Mother Nature, exacts her revenge—returning what we’ve done—in the perpetual skirmish on the battlefield of existence, symbolized by the serpent poised to sting, as I mentioned.

​

The Origin of Segura’s Visual Language

Some of the pieces emerging from this artist’s inner world resemble sheets of writing transformed into crumpled forms. They anchor me in the waters of interpretation because, although they have roots in script—as Vives Lorenzini points out—they are abstractions of an ideogrammatic language. Those “pages” evoke living architectures so powerfully that they recall the work of renowned architect Frank Gehry—one of the world’s most influential figures—celebrated for integrating a sensitive materiality with its environment, as in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Before designing such landmarks, Gehry would crumple a sheet of paper, forming masses he then sketched—intuing their internal structural forces—and from this abstract language he let the building, its interior, and its exterior spaces emerge in a constant state of (dis)tension, each shaping the other.

​

It’s worth recalling Escher’s paradox of the hand that, as it draws, draws itself—echoing the sociology of the 1970s, that what I do, does me (Mischerlich 1968).

Thus, from this epistemological standpoint, Segura’s painting makes itself: it subjects itself to its own inner tectonic forces, (de)fragments itself in a symbolic dance within the daily skirmish between humankind and the birthing Mother who delivered us all without exception—reminding us that we share a common origin.

​

Intertextual Dynamics and Perceptual Synesthesias

This depiction of colossal, corporeal collisions that compose the universe evokes for me the power of energetic vectors generating light and sound—the cosmic musicality of outer space. These synesthetic experiences—where color and material form resonate with sound—call to mind Gustav Holst’s The Planets, first performed in 1918.

 

Origins of Abstraction

In art, creative expression often mirrors or parallels processes found in nature and culture—innate talents or skills like singing, dancing, or declaiming among others. It’s remarkable that the ideogrammatic marks of the pre-Hispanic Mexican codices—drawn on amate paper or animal skins—were made by artists known as tlacuilos, who traditionally sang as they painted. Perhaps their songs drew forth or intensified the very talent required to manifest those images.

​

In Eastern cultures of the same centuries when this art flourished in Mesoamerica, scribes of those equally abstract strokes—inscribed on natural fiber papers—would move almost as if they were dancing while they wrote.

Elsewhere in the realm of art, abstraction already appeared in Maya and Mesoamerican textiles. In their vernacular architecture, one can discern foundational elements of what we call painting—the square, the circle, and the triangle served as threshold components of that visual language.

​

As Mexican curator Miguel Ángel Vives Lorenzini observes of Rebeca Segura’s work: “…if we go back in time we find examples as ancient as the schematic figures and geometric patterns in the rock paintings and petroglyphs of Val Camonica in Italy, Cundinamarca in Colombia, Valle del Encanto in Chile, or Boca de Potrerillos in Nuevo León, Mexico, among other sites worldwide. Another example of abstraction persisting from prehistory to today are the complex geometric motifs found in the ceramics and textiles of various cultures around the globe, which invites us to reflect on art’s function in expressing concepts. It’s worth noting that art and writing share a common origin that links them, much like the connection between the genesis of music and language.” (Vives 2024)

​

I’ll borrow this quote from Miguel to remark on the cruciform rose that appears in the Val Camonica petroglyphs—sometimes fancifully interpreted as an extraterrestrial spacecraft. I reject that notion because it diminishes the astonishing talent humans have demonstrated since time immemorial. That symbol reappears in numerous rock paintings and engravings throughout the Americas.

​

In the November 2021 issue of Meer Internacional, curator José Pablo Solís published “Abstraction: Ancestral Matter,” in which he references this continent’s textile abstractions: “…they generate a new sensitivity based on universal abstractions—principles such as the absence of literal representation. The recognition that abstraction was a trait of decorative arts in every era spurred the reflection that led to modern Western painting.” (Solís 2021)

To conclude this exploration of Rebeca Segura’s contemporary Mexican painting, I’ll revisit the work of Costa Rican composer Berny Siles, who insisted on honoring the Earth in his “Symphony of the Elements” (2012). I once wrote: “While much of the world was agog at the end of the Maya calendar in 2012—and fearful of the supposed final cataclysm (a misreading of the baktún cycle)—Siles offered a knowing wink, reminding the planet of its magnificence. His symphony gives holistic thanks to Mother Earth for air, fire, water, earth, wood, stone, light, and the abundance of gifts and talents we’ve been granted.” (Quirós 2024).

​

For the final reading focused on Rebeca Segura’s work, I orchestrate this full intertextual turn to demonstrate that abstraction did not begin in Europe with the Russian abstract‐sculpture movement, Constructivism, or what we call pure abstraction. Rather, it was already integral to the artistic practices of Mesoamerica’s indigenous peoples and those of the Andean highlands. From this premise we can trace the roots of today’s abstract art, in which the primordial terrestrial forces of our planetary system—or the universe—as well as the internal strata of the Earth’s surface, the dynamism of cities, and even our own human bodies, unite in a symphony of the elements—fire, water, air, and earth—in a germinal action stretching back to time immemorial.

​

Bibliography and References

​©2025 Rebeca Segura Rahme. All rights reserved.​

bottom of page