Paloma Contreras Lomas was back in London after an artist residency at Gasworks she undertook from January to March this year. The bad weather, she said, helped her and other residents work nonstop in the studio.

As she planned her exhibition at Gasworks in the autumn, she knew early on that she wanted to transform the gallery into a kind of cave. Although drawing has often been her preferred means of expression, she wanted to make paintings for this show.

The resulting exhibition, Disco Inferno, includes, alongside a video and several sculptures, three very large paintings which, according to Paloma, are “pretty baroque.” The main question for this exhibition was how to make “an image of hell.”

The context for this exploration, she explained, is the state violence that has marked Mexico over the past 20 years. Referring to killings and enforced disappearances by military and police forces, notably the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, she asked herself, “What can I do as an artist in front of the absent image of the body?”

Paloma talked about her idea of “Mexican Baroque,” a combination of histories and legacies that characterize, for example, a colonial-era building mixed with pre-Hispanic ruins that are also a mass grave. She joked, “Before I am an artist, I wish I could be a ghost hunter!”

In Paloma’s work, Gabriela Salgado reminded us, “there’s a lot of popular culture images, elements of toys, elements from digital media, television, magic, a kind of underworld images, and fictions mixed with pieces of reality.

This is a very complex, very baroque world on its own.” This echoes the very fabric of Mexico where you can find, for example, “an old Baroque church, and there are the ruins of Aztec monuments underneath, and also popular culture replicating those histories.

So when you are in Mexico City, you have the impression of being in many historical periods at the same time, which is a very prodigious, emotionally intense feeling because there are all these layers of history in your face.”

Contextualizing Paloma’s practice, Gabriela explained that in Mexico, “there is a lot of horror in cinema, in television and in painting, a lot of gore.”

This includes photographs of violent scenes in the press, in a way that is not imaginable in the U.K. She saw this gore imagery in Paloma’s exhibition, in the form of extraterrestrial beings and subterranean creatures, which are often represented with humor.

The important point is that this kind of imagery “is not sanitized.” Paloma agreed: “I consider Mexico as a slasher horror movie: you can run, but you cannot hide. It depends on how much money you have, and also how light your skin is.”

Talking about the iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, Paloma recalled visiting her museum, La Casa Azul, with her grandmother when she was a child. Yet she declared, “I have to say it loud and clear. I hate Frida Kahlo!” She is “a perfect example of body horror, and of oppression.”

Noting that Paloma studied at Mexico City’s La Esmeralda Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado, the heart of muralism where Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera studied, Gabriela then asked whether she honored the legacy of muralism, or whether she rebels against it.

While acknowledging that she is obsessed with muralism, Paloma insisted that she is not romanticizing it. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were interested in using the public space for artistic expression, and they were communists, she noted.

But the biggest difference between their situation and hers is that we are now living in neoliberal times, and “you definitely have to negotiate with private funding in order to exist.” She elaborated, “political art should be more important than ever with the rise of fascism that we are living right now.”

In 2025, Paloma had a joint exhibition with the Argentinian artist Carolina Fusilier in Mexico City. It was held at Museo Anahuacalli, the home of Rivera’s collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts, where, she said, he and Frida Kahlo wanted to be buried, although this plan was not carried out for either of them.

Recalling preparations for the exhibition with Fusilier, Paloma remembered, “we mocked [Diego Rivera] so bad that we felt his vengeance. Many bad things happened to us because we mocked him!”

She concluded that speaking from a feminist perspective, men are not her enemy. “Men in the third world are my allies. We have to be together in order to be better.”