In her Mexico City studio, Ángela Leyva transforms archives into evocative paintings that challenge the boundaries of memory and existence. Educated at Esmeralda and SOMA, with doctoral studies at UNAM, she merges artistic exploration with personal history, drawing from her father’s clinical archives to create images that honor the delicate impermanence of human life. Ángela’s work blurs the lines between documentation and imagination, inviting us into a space where memory, melancholy, and preservation coalesce. Through her art, she creates a unique dialogue between past and present, offering a timeless reflection on identity and existence.
"These archives become a space for existence." — Ángela Leyva
Background: Education and Inspiration
Ángela Leyva’s journey began with formal training at Esmeralda, a renowned art school in Mexico City. She later pursued advanced studies at SOMA and is now completing her doctorate at UNAM, focusing on painting as an archival practice. Her interest in archival work emerged when she began examining medical records and images belonging to her father, a geneticist whose work often involved rare and complex pediatric cases. This exposure fueled her fascination with the intersection of genetics, morphology, and the possible narratives embedded in clinical images.
Exploring the Archive and the Concept of Melancholy
Her work delves into clinical archives to explore the lives of children whose genetic conditions often limit their futures. "These archives become a space for existence," she explains, envisioning her paintings as a way to preserve moments that might otherwise fade away. This approach treats her work as a sanctuary for ephemeral memories.
“I became very interested in working with that image, an image of the child that remains in this pictorial space to look at and to be looked at. There's also this matter of gaze—when you look at a portrait, and that portrait looks back at you—creating this beautiful back-and-forth of questions.” — Ángela Leyva
Through her series Bilis Negra, Ángela connects the beings she works with to themes of melancholy and memory. “In ancient medicine, black bile was believed to signify an excess of melancholy,” she notes. This inspired her to create portraits that seem to exist in a suspended state of time—like memories “trapped in the past.”
Artistic Process and Evolution
Initially, Ángela used a technique that transferred elements of clinical photographs onto canvas using experimental printmaking. By partially obscuring the images, she maintained the anonymity of the lives captured while exploring the emotional depth in their “traces.” This approach allowed her to balance respect for the archive’s personal nature with her own artistic interpretation.
Over time, her work moved away from these direct photographic transfers, becoming more abstract and painterly. “I wanted to explore the characters beyond their physical features,” she explains. This evolution shifted her focus from literal depiction to a more interpretive exploration, allowing the beings to exist as ambiguous, emotional presences embracing a narrative of fiction and memory. In examining the faces, Ángela reflects on the capricious nature of memory: "Memory can invent as much as it remembers." Her paintings encourage viewers to create their own stories, blending fact with fiction as they engage with the image before them.
QUICK HITS
How does painting act as a space of preservation?
For Ángela, painting offers a permanent, intimate medium that outlasts the fragility of digital and photographic archives. “Painting holds a sense of history and preservation,” she says, positioning her work as a lasting homage to lives that might otherwise remain unseen.
What role does melancholy play in your work?
The notion of melancholy is central to Ángela’s work, where memory and nostalgia converge to give voice to these identities “forgotten in archives”. “The viewer’s interpretation is essential,” she shares, emphasizing the freedom to invent and question the origins and stories of the lives archived.
How has your artistic practice transitioned?
Ángela’s evolving practice reflects her growing distance from literal representation. By blurring and abstracting these figures, she shifts from historical documentation toward a more imaginative, painterly space—creating more surreal, amorphous beings that occupy an otherworldly space. These figures no longer directly connect to her archival presence but instead embody a “transcendence beyond reality,” as she puts it.
Use of AI in art
Her doctoral research incorporates AI to create “assemblages and mutations between images”, combining traditional painting with digital manipulation. This hybrid approach allows Ángela to experiment with new forms and poses questions about identity and existence in the digital age.
Performance as a ritualistic look Into the creative world
As a way to honor her Bilis Negra project, she envisions a public performance to deconstruct and reveal the process behind her work. "Yes, to destroy and reveal. To destroy in the sense that I want to unveil the image and the practice I’ve been working on for so long… it would be more of a ritual, a way to show or display the process so people can understand, because often they don’t understand what it involves—and that’s okay; it’s also part of the magic."