Manifesto of Rogelio Manzo Hurtado

Art operates in the fissure between the organic and the fabricated.

My materials are not arbitrary: glass alludes to fracture and transparency; gems, to mineral permanence versus the vulnerable; embroidery, to repair that does not erase the wound, but documents it. Fluids – liquid pigments, flowing resins – remind us that the body is not a static form but a system of exchanges, just like an ecosystem, just like a cell.

Biology interests me as a principle: everything is connected, every wound affects the whole, it teaches me that the scar is a process, not a state. Quantum physics, that the observer modifies what is observed. Astronomy, that our fragility is cosmic and our permanence, an instant.

I work with fragmented bodies because integrity is a fiction. I also work with constellations, with growth patterns, with the geometry of the minimum. The fractal tissue that runs through my compositions is not an ornament: it appears on the branches of a tree, in the neural network, in the distribution of galaxies. The microscopic and the infinite obey the same logic.

What is culturally discarded as superfluous – the brightness, the ornament, the decorative – can be as fundamental as the bone. Embedding is not adorning: it is asking if the superficial can become flesh. There is no “true interior” under the appearance. The surface also hurts.

I don’t aspire to the sublime. I aspire to the precise tension between the beautiful and the wounded, the perpetual and the ephemeral. Art does not resolve contradictions. It makes them visible – liquid, embroidered, fractal, always in process.