online catalogue
06.09.2025 - 26.10. 2025
Opening on Saturday, September 6th, from 5 - 8PM
Official Afterparty of the Gallery Opening Season: 8PM till late
Location: NMAG, Bos en Lommerweg 88-90
No Man’s Art Gallery is honoured to inaugurate the cultural season with Los fragmentos que curan, the debut solo exhibition in the Netherlands by RojoNegro, the artist duo of María Sosa (b. 1985, MX) and Noé Martínez (b. 1986, MX). In a new body of work, they approach the body as a site of ritual and spiritual dialogue, opening a chapter where ancestral knowledge and contemporary realities meet, transform and renew one another.
The exhibition centers on the three energetic points of the body described in Nahuatl cosmology: the heart, the liver and the head, each materialised in installations with fragments that interweave materials such as papel amate (handmade bark paper), ixtle thread, tobacco, crystal eyes and decorated cacao seeds.
One such work is Altepetl (2025), Nahuatl for “mountain” or “hill” (atl = “water” + tepetl = mountain) - a metaphor for place or state. Here, different fragments appear as birds, symbols of the heart in Mesoamerican culture. They are believed to take flight at the moment of death. Like a net, the work binds them together into an embodied territory, becoming a mountain that shelters a community.
In Reconstrucción del tonal (2025), RojoNegro turns to the tonal, the energetic essence of the head, associated with the sun and destiny. The work reflects on the foundations of their practice, suggesting a world that contains and coexists with many others. It is adorned with handwritten texts from the Declarations of the Selva Lacandona (the Zapatista Manifesto), a poetic call for Indigenous rights and resistance, alongside excerpts from the Mexican Constitution:
“Many words walk in the world. Many worlds are made. In the world of the powerful there is no space for anyone but themselves. In the world we want everyone to fit in. In the world we want many worlds to fit.” (From the Declarations of the Selva Lacandona)
Across the gallery, smaller canvases confront contemporary violence against bodies, race, and ecologies. Texts such as ‘Hay un México lleno de ojos que buscan’ (‘There is a Mexico full of eyes that search’), reference the countless disappearing throughout the country. Through these works, the artists ask how collective healing and the restoration of balance might be possible.
Alongside these, larger oil paintings such as Autorretrato de sombra II (2025) draw on pre-Hispanic codices and archaeological remains. Centered on the shadow, a liminal space between life and death, matter and spirit - the painting merges RojoNegro’s bodies into a collective self-portrait where archaeological figures resurface. Around them appear corn seeds for divination, the fallen warrior alongside a pregnant woman as a parallel form of struggle and dignity, the calves and legs as vital sites of strength in Mesoamerican thought and the jarilla amarilla, a plant used for energetic cleansing.
These figures connect to the video work Habitar lo oculto (2023), where RojoNegro re-stage the postures of archaeological figures through the body, releasing them from vitrines and returning them to life.“Our figure as artists, as a duo is really a vehicle for an objective: that these voices, silenced for 500 years, may live, may exist,” they write.
The practice of RojoNegro emerges from dialogue, kinship and the sharing of dreams. “Every day we wake up talking about our dreams,” they note. Dreams become repositories of knowledge, linking individual experience to collective memory and offering glimpses of other ways of being together.
With Los fragmentos que curan, RojoNegro opens a portal into narratives that remain alive in the present. At once political and poetic, the exhibition confronts the violence of colonisation and capitalism while insisting on the possibility of repair. “Contemporary art and practice is a platform for dialogue between the ancestral and the current and as a platform of care, because what is at stake is memory and life itself.” Each work is a fragment, yet together they assemble a world where balance and renewal become possible.
Installation view of Los fragmentos que curan, solo exhibition by RojoNegro (Noé Martínez and María Sosa). No Man's Art Gallery, Amsterdam, NL, 2025. Image by Jonathan de Waart
Installation view of Los fragmentos que curan, solo exhibition by RojoNegro (Noé Martínez and María Sosa). No Man's Art Gallery, Amsterdam, NL, 2025. Image by Jonathan de Waart
Installation view of Los fragmentos que curan, solo exhibition by RojoNegro (Noé Martínez and María Sosa). No Man's Art Gallery, Amsterdam, NL, 2025. Image by Jonathan de Waart
Installation view of Los fragmentos que curan, solo exhibition by RojoNegro (Noé Martínez and María Sosa). No Man's Art Gallery, Amsterdam, NL, 2025. Image by Jonathan de Waart
Autorretrato de sombra II (Detail), 2025, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 208 x 110 cm. Image by Jonathan de Waart
María Sosa graduated from the Universidad Michoacán de San Nicolas de Hidalgo. Sosa’s practice stems from her research about our shared colonial past and how it constitutes contemporary social dynamics as an epistemicide of prehispanic worlds, racism, sexism, and the invisibility of multiple nonwesterner’s ways of life in the American continent. Sosa’s work is nourished by her research of prehispanic art, anthropology, the methodology of Ecología de Saberes and the exploration of production techniques of ritual prehispanic and contemporary objects.
Noé Martínez is a visual artist and filmmaker who graduated from Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado (“La Esmeralda”) in Mexico City. His work functions as a case study that emerges from personal history, making use of ethnographic methodologies and research of the various histories of indigenous communities of the American continent.
RojoNegro’s recent solo exhibitions include: Volví a ser vasija, volví a ser animal a ser planta, volví a ser tiempo, Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Zapopan (MX), 2024; Tepalcates de sueños, commissioned by the Swiss Institute of New York in Mexico City (MX), 2022; and El encuentro de los tepalcates, an offsite project with a performance and presentation video commissioned by the Swiss Institute of New York (USA), 2021.
Their group exhibitions and projects include: Commission for Stuart Collection of UCSD University of San Diego (USA), upcoming; Fantastic Creatures, Museum Van Bommel Van Dam, Venlo (NL), upcoming; Transmisión Ancestral, Plataforma, Guadalajara, Jalisco (MX), 2024; Cordillera, Galería Extra, Guatemala City (GU), 2024; Las estrellas me iluminan al revés, No Man’s Art Gallery, Amsterdam (NL), 2022; and their participation in the Venice International Performance Art Week, Palazzo Mora, Venice (IT), 2016.