LEA MUGNAINI
Walking into Lea Mugnaini's show, Verde Brilliante, one has the sense of entering a terrarium. After passing through the sunlit glass, the first thing you see inside the lenticular plexiglassed-walls is a bronze-cast vine sprouting from concrete. The volcanic rocks strategically placed throughout the narrow space shepherd viewers towards the oxidized metallic cut-outs on the wall. 

An unexpected kinship emerges between the objects in the room. The jagged rocks, drawn from deep in the earth, offer record of the tectonic shifts that give rise to the water and plant life moving across the wall. Harsh stones and delicate flourishes are not opposing forms here; they are the residue of an organic process, a tilt towards novelty. 

I think it's no coincidence that our wide-ranging conversation — which spans her studio practice, philosophical references, and her architectural fascination — was interrupted by an earthquake. It was a fitting rhyme to a show in which stone, vine and foil all move on the same restless ground.

interview & text — 
BEN ADAMS-KEANE

photography —
RUBÉN GARAY

— mexico city, february 2026

verde brillante through feb 28th
colima 112, roma norte



BEN ADAMS-KEANE — What drew you to this very austere, streamlined space for your show?

LEA MUGNAINI — I was very attracted to the space because of its design and architecture. This transparent plexiglass with neon lines, and all these metal elements — it feels like a spaceship or an industrial container in which there's no possibility for life or existence of nature. My practice is almost the opposite of this - it’s about nature, organic shapes, vegetation, and how fluid elements evolve over time. 

So, that was a starting point in terms of challenging myself for this body of work, to have this contrast between my personal aesthetic and practice with an architecture that is austere, cold, and futuristic. It reminds me of industrial rooms in which they create artificial plants or seeds - somewhere that can create a perfect scenario for developing artificial existence.

BAK —  It's a great way to put it.

LM — So, the idea of creating artificial life was the starting point. When I have a solo show, I work site-specific. So my idea was not just to put pieces within the space but to make them for this space. 

BAK — They're very integrated. The plants appear to be threading through the slats in the ceiling, almost as if growing from it. I'm interested in the way you described it, “As a synthetic area for plant life to thrive”. Your work has always been about a procession of organic forms, characters, intelligent plant life emerging from a kind of fantastical world. How did you picture your practice evolving for this space, because in the past you've done a lot of sculptural work. Here you have mostly 2D work.
LM — I was interested in developing the series of drawings because they're linked to the element of water, which is something very related to Mexico City, and the practice that I've developed in the time I've been here. Not only because we are floating on a lake in Mexico City, but also because water is a serious topic here. So these are very linked to natural components of the environment I'm working in. They are creatures, they are shapes, they are fluid entities - all made with the same technique, similar shapes, all unique. 

This act of repetition is also a sort of metaphor for nature, inspired by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola text, Verde Brillante, the same title of my show. It's an entire branch of conceptual meaning and thematic research about plant intelligence and the centrality of vegetation and flora in our world. It also brings questions of what it could mean to abandon our anthropocenic focus. Mancuso is one of the major exponents of this pensiero, focusing his research in a philosophical and scientific approach on the centrality of plants. This is the theme that is now evolving within my work: How can I push this presence of natural elements in a more central way? This exhibition is actually focused on the elements linked to Mexico and Mexico City. So that's why you have the element of water, and the element of the volcanic rock. It's vibration, it's movement, it's earth, it's grounded. 

BAK — I like the way you describe your focus on plant life and the way we skip over its intelligence. If you walk around the drawings, there's a sense of them iterating off each other, that they're almost evolving. Very mycelial. You can feel like you're a part of a plant-intelligent network that's under the ground. Some of the forms end up being more simplistic, concise. There's the wonderful, very elegant peacock form, and then there are others where you seem to kind of let yourself go loose, which is just, it's almost madcap.
LM — Yes. 

BAK — And here, [comparing drawings] there's a sense of nature taking over, and over here feels more controlled.

LM — And here it's something more amorphable, more hybrid. Exploring the development of organic shapes is an ongoing process in my work. When you work with these kinds of elements, you see a lot of similarity within other branches of nature, where one shape can cross over into something else. For example, a shape could be a coral or a plant or the shape of water dropping on a surface, or a flower that turns into a tree. It's this whole organic sphere that evolves within itself.


BAK — It has its own will, and there's a sense of DNA underlying the process.  
LM — Plants reproduce themselves in a modular way, right? A tree reproduces itself through leaves and branches, producing similar, but unique forms. So that's something that is very linked to what I'm doing, this modular way of reproduction. I also talk a lot about metamorphosis. Everything is constantly in movement, developing and shifting. Nothing is static. There is constant and enormous change in nature, even though we don't perceive it. 

BAK — And, interestingly, I feel the avoidance of stasis in this work. You capture that in the material too, because as you pass by this metal foil, it changes color, it changes sheen, it changes texture, it gives a very different presence to each of the forms as you pass by them. How did you find this material?
LM — Exactly. What I use on the cutout is oxidized silver and gold leaf, which I started to work with four years ago. Previously I worked with normal gold and silver leaf that hadn’t oxidized. And then, I was in Italy in a residency, working there in my studio for two months and I would go every second, third day to an art shop to buy material. So they knew me, and were always happy to see me spending all my money in the shop. And one day, the owner stopped me and tells me, Lea, I have something for you. She comes with a huge box, and inside was this oxidized silver leaf that she would not be able to sell anymore because it was old and not the quality that they were meant to sell. 


BAK — The shopkeeper offering you the decomposed gold leaf is great because that's an organic process, in and of itself. That creates a kind of perceived imperfection, but it also mirrors, at least to me, what's happening in this space. You have this hard-edged perfection, with the plexiglass, the metal slats. And out of it there's a kind of organic entropy - but it's a positive entropy. It's hopeful, in that something very organic emerges from what initially appears to be cold and metallic - and this dual quality is also in the material.

LM — Oxidation is a natural process that’s linked to the exuberance of natural elements, right? You cannot contain nature. You cannot block it. Water, for example, is fluid and will always find a way to either evaporate or move or take its own shape. The oxidization is also a fluid process that is ongoing and reflects the movement of time, and the way that it is unstoppable. So there is also this aspect of our vulnerability to the rhythm of time.

BAK — That’s a good transition because there's a formal rhythm between the shapes, and then there's a more conceptual rhythm and evolution, which gets transposed into these rocks, which formally are jagged. They could be hundreds or thousands of years old. They superficially depart from the forms, but they carry this sense of natural growth. I know it was an unexpected decision to install these in the show, and, in the text, the rocks are described not as supports, but as geological bodies of their own, which is fantastic. So, they're sort of characters in their own way, analogous to the characters on the wall. Could you talk about the process of deciding on that?
LM — Carlos and I started digging into what could be possible in collaborating between art and architecture. I wanted to bring something more earthy to the space, specifically something of Mexican terrain. Carlos works a lot with this material in his construction work. There was the intention from the beginning where people could sit and meditate on the space. We were at first thinking of something more functional, but decided this was too simplistic. We went to this volcanic rock cave, and it became quite clear that we wanted to have these inside the space.

These would be in direct dialogue with the drawings and the architecture in terms of evolutionary development, the urban landscape, and the natural landscape. I wanted to give the feeling of entering a space that is not connected to what we call planet Earth, but something from a different spectrum.


BEN —It's interesting because there are stories of people meditating in areas with high concentrations of volcanic rock, where they see they disappear from the earth, whether you believe it or not. The story there is that the electromagnetic fields issued from the volcanic rock actually transport them to another planet. 
LM - When you’re so close to volcanic rocks, it’s hard to not think of the energy they actually do contain. Because they do come directly from the bulbo, the center of the earth - very energetic.

BAK — Yeah, and there's a great sense of that because they are in the center of the space. And they're very raw. They're jagged, as I said. There’s a sense of energy emanating outwards, into what we would describe as the more floral or elegant forms. But they're all part of the same evolutionary process. 
LM — We chose them one by one, in terms of placement in the space. It was very intense, because they're very, very heavy, and their presence is just presence. They're almost floating on the floor and they give a rhythm for visitors to move within the space.

BAK — You navigate them.
LM — By moving around them, you are confronted with what earth, and our connection to this material that created the landscape we walk on in Mexico City. This is a very new approach to my practice in terms of working with architecture and challenging myself how to use the installation space in a more physical way. As you said, you have to navigate the rocks, whereas the drawings are frontal and direct. Putting the rocks in front of the drawings on the wall solicits a different approach to viewing so that you don’t fall over the stones to get a closer look at the work on display.


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