Pervertere

Descardano Mota (Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas)  has developed a painterly practice that resists visual comfort. Self-taught and possessing a distinctive visual language, he finds in oil paint the ideal medium through which to explore what often remains concealed: desire, solitude, anxiety, and the ambiguous territories of human experience. His restrained palette and the intensity of his contrasts transform flesh into an emotional landscape, where every body appears suspended between vulnerability and instinct.

Descardano Mota is part of the new generation of artists that make up the ASTA House program.

Installation view. Infernum by Descardano Mota, featuring sculptures by Juan Trujillo.

PERVERTERE

In this series, naked bodies intertwine until their boundaries become uncertain. The eye attempts to determine where one figure ends and another begins, yet the painting refuses such clarity. The result recalls the original meaning of the word perversion, derived from the Latin pervertere: to overturn an established order, to divert something from its intended course. Descardano subverts the conventional notion of the body as an isolated, autonomous entity, proposing instead an experience of fusion, contamination, and mutual transformation.

For those viewing through rigid moral or aesthetic frameworks, this disruption may be perceived as corruption. The accumulation of flesh, the physical proximity, and the dissolution of individual boundaries create a deliberate sense of unease. Yet beyond this initial reading lies another possibility. What appears to be deformation may instead be understood as union; what seems excessive may become transcendence. At this point, the work enters into dialogue with the concept of the hieros gamos, the sacred union found across numerous symbolic traditions, in which two principles cease to exist separately and give rise to a new reality.

Totem 1 and Totem 2, Descardano Mota.

Descardano Mota's paintings do not seek to illustrate an erotic scene. Rather, they capture the moment when identity becomes unstable and the individual relinquishes the certainty of their own contours. There are echoes of desire, pleasure, and the longing for contact, but also of a deeper anxiety: the possibility of losing oneself in another in order to discover something beyond the self.

Each work functions both as an invitation and as a test. It demands time, attention, and a willingness to move beyond the surface of the image. Those who accept that challenge encounter paintings charged with psychological tension, painterly power, and a rare emotional honesty. At a time when much contemporary visual production favours immediacy, Descardano offers images that remain in the memory precisely because they refuse to provide easy answers.

Curated by The Curated Hammer | Regina Favela