Diego Medina's 'Shew Stone' at Smoke the Moon reveals landscapes of the mind

SANTA FE — Diego Medina’s twilight-hued landscapes, on view now at Smoke the Moon, pop and sizzle with moments of purple and hot pink exuberance.

Those who have seen the current SITE Santa Fe International exhibition may recall Medina’s wall of vertically-oriented landscape paintings, which are installed in the same room as Agnes Pelton’s mystical landscape paintings from the 1930s. Whereas Pelton’s imagery is clearly fantastical — neon stars dancing in paisley patterns and the like — Medina’s is more understated. A rainbow-colored blip in the sky could be a UFO, an interdimensional portal or merely sunlight glinting off an airplane. While Pelton’s work comes with implicit claims about the veracity of mystical experiences, the ambiguity in Medina’s paintings shifts the onus back on us, the viewers, to interrogate our own perceptions.

Medina’s show at Smoke the Moon amps up the perceptual ambiguity. The title, “Shew Stone,” references a black mirror of polished obsidian, which the 16th century English occultist and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, John Dee, allegedly stole from the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II (also known as Montezuma). At the time, both the Aztecs and European occultists like Dee used reflective surfaces in a form of divination known as scrying. For those who believe in such things, Moctezuma II’s “shew stone” was a powerful piece of technology, a secret supernatural weapon, whose theft left the Aztec Empire vulnerable to its conquest at the hands of the Europeans.

In Medina’s “Shew Stone” paintings, curtains of flame fall from the sky and pink comets waltz like spectral hallucinations seen through a dark glass. In “Until We Meet Again,” a curved warping of space at the top of the composition contributes to the idea that we are observing these landscapes through an actual shew stone.

Many artists have played with warped perspectives, from Hans Holbein the Younger’s use of anamorphic distortion in “The Ambassadors” (1533) to Ira Cohen’s psychedelic Mylar photographs from the 1960s to Jeff Koons’ “Gazing Ball” series from the 2010s. Such experiments are sometimes regarded as novelties, clever but not entirely serious.

What sets Medina’s work apart is its subtlety. In “Mirror of Mine,” Medina paints whorls of transparent glaze on top of his cloudforms. These whorls might represent wispy spirit beings, natural atmospheric effects or smudges and imperfections in the shew stone itself. Are they miracles or blemishes? We don’t know. And that’s what makes the work interesting.

Human brains, after all, are hardwired to see meaningful patterns in nature, even when such patterns are purely coincidental. In extreme cases, this neurological quirk can plunge us into states of delusion. According to the psychiatrist Shitij Kapur’s aberrant salience theory of psychosis, excess dopamine in the brain, coupled with the brain’s natural impulse to recognize patterns, causes some people to experience hidden meanings where none exist, leading to schizophrenic delusions.

But what about the commonplace experience of gazing at a desert sunset and finding it beautiful, or deeply moving? Isn’t the idea that the natural world is inherently “beautiful,” or that it exists primarily to please us humans visually or stir our souls, itself a delusional notion — not to mention speciesist and narcissistic?

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was profoundly disturbed by the fact that he found landscapes beautiful. In “Being and Nothingness,” he described the natural world as having no inherent purpose or meaning, yet, like most of us, he couldn’t help experience a sense of harmony and completeness while gazing at its colors and shapes. The human mind actively imposes ideas of “beauty” onto purely coincidental arrangements of rocks, trees, mountains and clouds, which, for someone like Sartre, is problematic.

Medina’s paintings are beautiful. But they also call attention to the active role we perform as viewers in constructing beauty in our minds.

It’s worth noting that Medina did not literally paint the “Shew Stone” paintings en plein air while gazing at landscapes reflected in obsidian discs. He took photographs around New Mexico, where he has lived all his life, and used those photographs as springboards for his free imagination. The fantastical magic-mirror landscapes he painted for this show are analogs for inner journeys of the mind.

Titles like “Freedom and Liberation!” and “Angel’s Journey” add extra layers of supernatural meaning to the landscapes in question. Medina has stated that his “Shew Stone” paintings are further inspired by the Stations of the Cross, a 14-step Catholic devotional framework that once inspired the abstract-expressionist painter Barnett Newman, as well. Medina’s paintings, like Newman’s, are not really about Jesus. They use the Stations of the Cross as a formal structure for exploring successive psychological states of turmoil, doubt and transcendence.

Some spiritually-inclined viewers may feel themselves absorbed into these paintings, communing with the contours of Medina’s glowing horizons. Others may take a more distanced, analytical stance, seeing the “Shew Stone” works as opportunities to plumb the nature of visual perception and aesthetic interpretation. In either case, the works are not escapist, despite the fantasy elements. Like actual shew stones, these magic mirrors lead us into the terra incognita of our own subconscious minds, which we can explore as deeply as we want.

Diego Medina's 'Shew Stone' at Smoke the Moon reveals landscapes of the mind