O-1 Visas
The Mexico City-born painter Berenice Vargas Bravo, trained in Nantes and Chicago, is nothing if not syncretic. Her paintings look like they were made in one of China’s art factories, with their mix of socialist realism, surrealistic juxtaposition, and pop sensibility, and their referential reach is global, stretching from European painting to Mexican folk rituals, Greek mythology to contemporary politics. Always they are peopled by wild-eyed girls, whose mischievous grins warn you that they are not to be messed with, even when armed only with colored crayons, as in “El dibujo (The Drawing).” The feel in this and works like “La venda (The Veil)” or “Mujer árbol (Tree Woman)” is—at least for me—deeply relatable but unpleasantly so, because though I recognize the sometimes terrible situations that these young women are in, I wish very strongly that I didn’t.
—Lori Waxman 3/20/26 2:07 PM