Nihura Montiel’s monochrome palette of black charcoal and white absence does not merely neutralize; it estranges. With restriction giving way to distance, images are drained of vitality and re-essenced, husked and removed. Montiel’s grayscale courts abstraction, stripping objects of their specificity and transforming them into vessels, open to floating associations and transference of meaning. In relinquishing the allure of color, desire’s shifting tendencies alongside absence’s cool orbit of memory and mourning are laid bare.
Candidly displayed on disappearing backdrops, the presentations are deceptively straightforward. While always inviting consumption, the images also devour and displace—replacing the past with a new iteration. Stored in neatly nested layers, images of images compress and divide their value. Each transformation cannibalizing the last while fracturing desire in the process.
Montiel’s recursive logic displaces yearning as the subject transforms into object, into image, into painting—each step further from any notion of original. Layers build up like a compressed and enmeshed image economy. Representation always splitting desire, as visibility preserves and displaces. Charcoal, brushed delicately across the surface, merges concepts of photography and painting, building shadows and capturing light within negative space. The pictures develop almost like an emulsion, fixing an image through the gradual control of density.
Montiel’s practice explores not only the consumption of images but the endless hunger to possess them. A choreography of substitution performed as desire never rests, only shifts. Every translation—from subject to object to image—exposes a vital gap between what’s desired and what remains. After circling symbols of beauty, power, and seduction, we’re left with an exquisite emptiness.
Charting the corners of photography’s indexical nature by quoting the past, capturing the present, and preserving for the future—Montiel’s work points at once toward life and death. Unlike organic matter, her objects float in preserved detachment, only ever pristine representations. In camp elegance, their symbols insinuate an artifice of luxury—poised for consumption yet something’s hollowed out. Desire, it seems, always lurking one step ahead, flickers in the next reflection.
—Marie Heilich
Nihura Montiel (b. 1988, San Diego, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Montiel received her BFA from Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She has exhibited at Sebastian Gladstone Gallery (Los Angeles), In Lieu (Los Angeles), Mrs.Gallery (New York), Carlye Packer (Los Angeles), Padre Gallery (New York), Volery Gallery (Dubai), Château du Marais (France), and Amor Services (Los Angeles). Montiel is represented by Sebastian Gladstone Gallery.
