It is said that there once existed a place where jaguars and flamingos, serpents and exotic birds coexisted under the care of Moctezuma II, the tlatoani (ruler) of the Mexica empire: a garden in which nature was not subdued, but arranged as a reflection of the sacred. This zoological enclave—described by the conquistadors with astonishment and fascination— was ultimately reduced to ashes, as though even the sublime could be erased by the gesture of power. From this space—suspended between history and myth—emerges From Moctezuma’s Zoo, a solo exhibition by Christian Poiré. His artistic practice originates in drawing as a primordial gesture: an act of invocation that gradually expands into oil and mosaic, allowing the image to unfold across new surfaces and reveal its latent meanings. The works gathered in this exhibition do not construct a linear narrative, but rather a constellation of symbols in which echoes of Mesoamerican culture, fragments of landscape, references to modern design, and ornamental traces coexist. Within them, the flamingo reappears as an emblem of colonized beauty, while surfaces become fields of inscription where history, myth, and memory enter into dialogue. Poiré’s visual language inhabits an interstitial territory between the ancestral and the contemporary. His compositions articulate an alphabet that resists oblivion, reminding us that beneath the layers of time persist images, symbols, and cosmologies in which death was not conceived as destruction, but as transition and continuity. In this sense, From Moctezuma’s Zoo proposes a reflection on the images that inhabit us: those we inherit, those power seeks to erase, and those that, like amulets, endure. In Poiré’s work, even among ruins, beauty reemerges as incantation, memory, and promise.

Daniela Garcia

Founder & Art Advisor