From June 6 to July 31, 2026, Momart Gallery presents Selvatico/Domestico, a solo exhibition by Eliel David Martínez Julián, curated by Alessia Pietropinto.
The exhibition explores the symbolic and cultural correspondences between Mexico and Southern Italy through a body of works that investigate memory, ritual, landscape, and collective identity. Conceived as a space of encounter between distant yet deeply resonant territories, Selvatico/Domestico reflects on the ways in which communities preserve, transmit, and transform their cultural heritage through everyday practices, myths, and shared imaginaries.
At the core of Martínez Julián’s artistic practice lies the notion of traversal: a continuous movement between places, histories, and systems of belief. Through painting, textile elements, installation, and symbolic imagery, the artist constructs visual narratives where animal figures, vegetal forms, hybrid presences, and layered surfaces coexist within a fluid and interconnected ecosystem. His works do not seek to represent specific places or stories, but rather to evoke emotional geographies shaped by migration, memory, and cultural exchange.
Developed during the artist’s encounter with Matera, the exhibition establishes a dialogue between the vernacular architectures of Southern Italy and the communal traditions of rural Mexico. The city itself becomes an active interlocutor within the project, offering a landscape in which themes of shelter, belonging, and collective survival resonate across time and geography. Through this exchange, Martínez Julián reveals unexpected affinities between Mediterranean and Mesoamerican cultures, highlighting shared relationships with the earth, ritual practices, popular spirituality, and domestic life.
The exhibition title refers to the tension between the wild and the domestic, not as opposing conditions but as complementary dimensions of human experience. Throughout the exhibition, images and materials oscillate between intimacy and openness, protection and exposure, permanence and transformation. The recurring presence of animals, plants, and symbolic forms generates a poetic vocabulary through which the artist reflects on the porous nature of identity and the persistence of cultural memory.
Selvatico/Domestico ultimately unfolds as a space of relation, where painting becomes more than an image: it becomes an environment of exchange, a repository of stories, and a living surface capable of connecting different worlds. Through a practice grounded in empathy, materiality, and symbolic imagination, Martínez Julián invites viewers to recognize within the culture of the other something unexpectedly familiar.
The exhibition will be open until September 1, 2026, with visiting hours from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM and 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM at Momart Gallery, every day except Wednesdays.