“Painting is about finding the escape route”

Curled up in the fetal position, a spider monkey clutches the femur bone of an animal larger than his own species. His fluffy tail is long – impossibly long – arranged into a labyrinthine configuration like a mysterious puzzle. Like many of the paintings by the Mexican artist Raúl Rueda, Laberinto (2025) doesn’t offer the viewer any answers, and the nature of the question it asks is just as cryptic. Yet, somehow, we sense that these are questions we have once confronted ourselves. With his tail splayed out like the curlicue of the world’s longest question mark, the monkey protects a secret that is not his own but could be ours.

To his family, the 33-year-old artist is known simply as ‘Monkey’, a childhood nickname that recognised his obsession with the animal. To his colleagues at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, he is a rising young curator who puts on shows that reframe Mexican art history from new vantage points. Now he is beginning to become known as an emerging, self-taught painter, whose recent solo show at Galerie Nordenhake’s Mexico City space (the artist’s second ever exhibition) has stirred the local art scene into a frenzy.

I don't think of painting as a practice of invention. It is a conversation with time.

It was late last autumn when the historian Francisco Berzunza was scrolling through Instagram and was stopped in his tracks by a quiet painting of a crouching monkey. Unfamiliar with the artist’s name, he dropped him a message to ask if he could come by the studio sometime. He soon found himself in Rueda’s modest bedroom, where the artist opened a drawer and pulled out a blanket. Nestled inside were “many different works,” says Berzunza. “They are very small – minuscule. I was completely fascinated,” 

Struck by the power of these small canvases, which at that point had only left the artist’s bedroom once for a small show in a friend’s project space in his hometown of Guadalajara, Berzunza offered to put Rueda in touch with some galleries he thought might be interested. “Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, came this painter who is incredibly talented and whose works are highly desirable. There were several galleries fighting to sign him.”

Installation view of Raúl Rueda's exhibition, Navaja peluda (Hairy knife), at Galerie Nordenhake in Mexico City.

Fast-forward eight months to the end of May and Rueda’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake, titled Navaja peluda (Hairy knife). The artist presented a new series of tablet-like paintings that together depict a crepuscular world of dead ends, false starts and non-sequiturs. Rueda’s spider monkey, a species native to Mexico, stalks an unending warren of grey, anonymous spaces where doors open on to more doors, and hallways connect iterations of nowhere. “Painting is always an exercise in how to find an escape route,” the artist explains. And, as is often true in life, the only way out is through: “With painting you are always going inside and inside and inside.”

Navaja peluda was something of a hall of mirrors, with the monkey’s image fragmenting across reflections of reflections that often fail to match their sources. A few works functioned as diptychs, with smaller canvases splintering away from their parent image to provide another view of nothing in particular. The monkey plays a game of hide-and-seek with his own shadow. But something is off. The rationale of cause-and-effect doesn’t work here. Not unlike Dorothea Tanning’s febrile images of purgatory’s corridors, this could be a scene from an anxiety dream. The monkey, unfazed, carries on calmly.

Raúl Rueda, Tantos tiempos, 2026. Oil on linen 20x40 cm. Courtesy: Galerie Nordenhake.

“Things happened with the exhibition that I’ve never seen before, at least in Mexico,” Berzunza recalls. “People dropping to their knees to beg for a painting. People arriving unexpectedly in the middle of the opening, asking, ‘Where are the monkeys?’” With works ranging in price from $5,000 to $10,000 (£4250–8500), the show sold out in 36 hours. Not bad for an artist that no one had heard of. “Mexico hasn’t really seen a similar craze to that of Brazil’s Lucas Arruda. My intuition tells me that Raúl might become that.”

He may be self-trained but the restraint with which Rueda deploys gesture, motif, palette and technique express an elegant confidence. He trained as an art historian, thinking that a less precarious career path than actually making art, and his paintings are steeped in reference and allegory. “I don't think of painting as a practice of invention. It is a conversation with time because painting has its own story,” Rueda explains. “I want to be in conversation with my references, like I am with the artists I work with as a curator.” 

But the future isn’t far from the artist’s mind either. He thinks a lot about impending ecological collapse. “There are now a lot of AI videos being made of monkeys acting like humans. What’s behind it? Is the internet preparing us for the end of savage life?”

I want to look into their eyes and find something.

He names the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916) as a key influence, whose enigmatic paintings of austere domestic interiors appear to have been made some two hundred years before his time. The painting as a place for seance – the idea of conversing with art history’s ghosts rather than one’s own contemporaries – fascinates Rueda. Appropriating art history’s imagery or stylistic flourishes is of lesser interest than the challenge of imagining how a painter from the past might conceive an image today. 

Adored by Frida Kahlo, spider monkeys hold a special place in Mexican culture, representing irrepressible playfulness and sexuality. Across cultures, apes are often idealised as a representation of our prelapsarian state, offering some sort of connection with a fundamental part of the untamed self. 

Raúl Rueda, Reflejo inconcluso, 2026. Oil on linen 20x30 cm. Courtesy: Galerie Nordenhake.

“In the history of painting, monkeys have always done what humans want to do but can’t because of our moral limits,” Rueda explains of his choice of subject. The Museo de Arte Moderno where Rueda works is situated near Chapultepec Zoo. He goes regularly to see the monkeys. “I want to look into their eyes and find something, you know?”

Historically, unlike the great apes, monkeys have failed self-recognition tests, leading to the consensus that they lack the self-awareness that implies human affinity. Curiously, the spider monkey is something of an outlier among similar species: dismissive of its own reflection, it quickly recognises its spatial environment in the glass, often prompting the monkey to inspect the room afresh. In the world Rueda’s monkey explores, the mirror’s glitches are not because the animal is unable to use the object, but rather because here the mirrors “don’t work as part of a human system”, he explains. “The monkeys exceed human logic.”

In Franz Kafka’s 1917 short story A Report to an Academy, a favourite of Rueda’s, the narrator, Red Peter, describes his former life as an ape, explaining how he managed to negotiate his release from captivity by adopting the behaviour and habits of the ‘civilised’ gentlemen who built and guarded his cage. ‘I did not demand freedom either then or today… human beings all too often are deceived by freedom,’ Red Peter proclaims. ‘And since freedom is reckoned among the most sublime feelings, the corresponding disappointment is also among the most sublime.’

Raúl Rueda, Reflejo inconcluso, 2026. Oil on linen 20x30 cm. Courtesy: Galerie Nordenhake.

In Rueda’s painting Un sueño su sombra (2025), the monkey’s shadow stands on his hind legs and tries out the femur for size (it’s too large). Rueda’s paintings give form to a question that will follow us forever: how humanity is gained and how it is lost. In Reflejo-inconcluso (2026) we see several of the works from the exhibition in miniature, as if the cheeky monkey has grabbed the paintings off the wall of the gallery and taken them home. Somehow, he has managed to find the escape route.