HOVE.- Maureen Paley presents Errantry, the third solo exhibition at the gallery by Felipe Baeza, and his first time shown at Morena di Luna, Hove.

The following is a commissioned text by Christopher Alessandrini which has been written to accompany the exhibition:

Errantry: A Sense of Enclosure

“but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed in silvery images”
– Frank O’Hara, “Ave Maria”

To stray is to diverge from the righteous path, to wander beyond the pale of prelapsarian virtue. It suggests deviation, distraction, failure, sin. But during the Renaissance, in the era of Wunderkammern, curiosity—having shed its fraught association with decadence and indulgence—was understood as a powerful tool for apprehending the correspondences between a vast cosmic order and life on earth. And for those traditions that predated or existed outside the Christian world, knowledge gleaned from error, accident, or experiment was often instrumental to survival and social progress.

Felipe Baeza has long possessed a discursive, wayward intelligence, from his collages of vintage beefcake photography spliced with ancient American sculpture to his mythologically inflected collagraphs depicting scenes of violence and intimacy. His practice allows for rigorous formal and material investigations that privilege the provisional and serendipitous over the solely technical or strategic. With Errantry, he continues to elaborate a universe where mystery prevails and where straying from traditional models is a vital step in the alchemical process.

Baeza’s scenes are often anchored in elaborate if semi-visible metaphysical systems. The central figures in signals below the surface (2026) whorl around each other, rendered in tendrils of varnished flame that terminate in the artist’s signature cut-paper hands. Each is identifiable only by a set of recessed eyes that peer into the distance, refusing to meet the viewer’s gaze. Two confronting serpent’s jaws seem to breathe these entities into the frame. Sacred or profane, benevolent or sinister? It hardly matters; they are undeniably animate. This field of action is contained within a gently undulating border the lustrous shade of fallen magnolia leaves, a deep yellow-brown that conveys a sense of womblike warmth or abyssal enclosure. A proscenium is critical to any theater of transformation. Only under specific conditions can certain acts of enchantment unfold.





The single wraithlike figure in en el umbral del desvío (2026), smaller in scale yet similarly bound in a richly textured border, seems to rise from a pair of hands that protrude from the earth and conduct the scene, somehow maintaining its queer illusionism. Do they belong to another body beneath the rocks or is their appearance here a glimpse of some greater, incommunicable infrastructure? In elsewhere, still (2026), another pair of disembodied arms issues from above, extending toward a porous, bell-shaped figure at center whose contours subtly echo these sinuous limbs. The gap between forms insinuates some correspondence or rhyme, as if these arms have hatched the figure or seek to recapture it in a game of matryoshka. Without further context the picture is impossible to parse, as descriptive yet withholding as a film still.

Frank O’Hara was talking about the cinema when he wrote “what about the soul / that grows in darkness, embossed in silvery images”—but he could have been referencing the caves of Naj Tunich, a significant ritual site for the Maya inscribed with early homoerotic iconography. Grottos, long associated in Maya cosmology with fertility and the underworld, were conceived as spaces of generative power, ripe with the potential for transformation. Some archaeologists have speculated that cave art and its attendant pageantry might be considered one of the earliest known ancestors of contemporary cinema. If the ancients had Lascaux, Atxurra, and Naj Tunich, we have Technicolor and surround sound.

For O’Hara, the soul was a heady pastiche of Hollywood glamour and public sex, clandestine pleasures tinged with the promise of self-discovery: an audience of flickering shades fumbling toward enlightenment under the projector’s beam. A visit to the movies was often about what happened offscreen, in the dark—carnal knowledge forged between strangers who resurfaced hours later in the haze of ordinary life, imperceptibly but profoundly altered, tuned to a different frequency. The cinema, like the cave, is a charged space where desire is broached and articulated, maneuvered and shaped, given room to grow.

This logic of cruising persists in “Sonder,” an enigmatic series of faceless portraits featuring only the eyes of artists, writers, and intellectuals whose visionary oeuvres have influenced Baeza’s worldview. His latest addition is dedicated to the late queer icon and activist Agosto Machado, famous for his intricate shrines composed of personal effects and ephemera—powerfully indiscriminate accumulations of high and low that sought to memorialize cherished community members in meticulously ordered devotional arrangements. Here, Baeza has created a tribute in kind for the great commemorator of his generation. Two smaller portraits of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson accompany Machado.

In lieu of a formal altar, Baeza has installed at Morena di Luna a vitrine of ephemera and printed matter from his studio: physical record of affinities and influences brought into communion with Agosto, Sylvia, and Marsha. One of the clearest ways to visualize a kinship network is to place artifacts and images in direct conversation, creating, in microcosm, a transhistorical stage of artists and artworks united through sensibility. An exhibition nested within an exhibition.

In a world of increasing standardization and surveillance, to drift or stray is to arouse suspicion. Baeza, like O’Hara, understands that the soul can only develop its fullest range of expression in darkness—yet there are few public venues in modern life that lend themselves to such private, inner transformations, where Eros is allowed to develop and thicken like darkroom prints. Public life is increasingly bright, clean, frictionless. The moral imperatives of transparency and docility find their counterparts in glass-walled, open-plan apartments and offices: fishbowls for a viceless citizenry without any need for privacy, built for the delectation of a scopophilia oligarchy whose primary kink is monitoring and tracking its feudal subjects.





While enclosure might suggest entrapment or control, it can also provide a cloistered area where—if conditions are hospitable—the unexpected or esoteric can take root and flourish. Security cameras are often fixed over doorways or in corners, presumably facing center stage. After all, what essential action could possibly occur on the threshold, in that interstitial space between spaces? Nothing noteworthy—and so it goes unrecorded, a zone of reverie. These fallow tracts, beyond the eye of the state, are places where the soul can wander. What solace or refuge can these liminal sites offer those forced to shuttle between worlds? Or those who choose, deliberately, to stay in motion?

Baeza’s practice is marked by a productive restlessness that refuses to settle in any one medium or visual vocabulary. This pointed rejection of stasis has allowed him to draft new possibilities with remarkable inventiveness, redrawing and expanding the boundaries of his fantastical realms even as he faithfully returns to certain motifs and types. Perhaps the greatest reward of this elliptical method is its asymptotic approach to revelation, a playful deferral that propels him toward uncharted forms, always searching for new images in the dark.

Felipe Baeza (b. 1987, Guanajuato, Mexico) lives and works in New York, USA. He was recently the subject of a solo exhibition, Anima, at the Print Center, New York, USA (2026). The exhibition will tour to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles from November 2026 – April 2027. Further selected solo exhibitions include: To feel a then and there, kurimanzutto, Mexico City, Mexico (2025); Unruly Forms, Public Art Fund, Chicago, New York, and Boston, and Mexico City, Léon, Querétaro in Mexico (2023); Made Into Being, Fortnight Institute, New York, NY, USA (2022); Unruly Suspension, Maureen Paley, London, UK (2021), and Maureen Paley, London, UK (2019). Felipe Baeza was included in The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (2022).

Works by Baeza are currently held in museum collections including the Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, USA; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, USA; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, USA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, USA; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, USA; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, USA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, USA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA.