Carmen Neely, never as opaque as you imagine, 2025. Detail. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.
Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present a solo exhibition with Carmen Neely entitled, a trace beyond the life of the body, at the gallery in Mexico City. Marking the artist’s first solo presentation in Latin America and her third with the gallery, the exhibition unfolds at a focal moment in Neely’s practice, as she now divides her time between Chicago and Mexico City.
Intimately connected to writing, Neely’s painting emerges as a form of inscription: one that unfolds on canvases prepared with a transparent primer or, for the first time in this exhibition, with a light beige ground that recalls the raw canvas she has long favoured. This subtle chromatic shift acts as a conceptual threshold: neither blank nor fully neutral, the surface becomes a site where change is tensely negotiated.
A conscious witness to the political realities shaping the world, Neely understands the present as a moment in which history is not simply narrated, but actively rewritten through erasure, strategic concealment, and intentional distortion. While political power has always sought to shape collective memory, the scale and clarity with which this is occurring today has deeply affected the artist’s way of seeing.
These concerns materialize through a plastic gesture introduced in works presented for the first time in this exhibition: the use of masking tape as a compositional tool. Applied between layers of paint, the tape is successively removed to reveal negative spaces that recall the blacked-out lines of censored texts or classified documents. Yet here, the space is not erased into silence; it remains visibly marked, overwritten. What is left behind is evidence of intervention. The canvas becomes a field where the struggle for stability and narrative cohesion unfolds within an abstract language that remains acutely responsive to the world.
Carmen Neely’s personal engagement with the construction of history resonates with the work of artists and thinkers such as Christina Sharpe, who has theorized and employed black redaction as a form of protection and refusal in both visual and textual practices. In her research, Sharpe has obscured portions of archival photographs of enslaved women—often leaving visible only a narrow band of their eyes—in order to resist the re-victimization that accompanies the circulation of images originally produced to enact violence on Black bodies. Through strategic omission and transformation, Sharpe reclaims agency, redirecting attention away from what is explicitly represented and toward what exceeds the frame, opening space for alternative modes of reading and seeing.
A similar reclaiming of redaction as an active, generative gesture can be found in contemporary poetry. Writers such as Quenton Baker and Nicole Sealey treat historical documents as sites of intervention, extracting submerged narratives from official records. In we pilot the blood, Baker obscures and rearranges language drawn from U.S. Senate documents describing the 1841 rebellion aboard the ship Creole, a revolt that led to the escape of most of the enslaved people on board. Sealey, in The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, appropriates and redacts police reports related to the 2014 murder of Michael Brown, transforming bureaucratic language into a space for mourning, resistance, and historical reckoning. In both cases, redaction becomes not an act of removal, but one of revelation, allowing suppressed histories to surface through absence.
The works presented in Carmen Neely’s a trace beyond the life of the body arise from what the artist describes as an unanswerable question: how to uphold memory while also upholding truth. Vibrant traces and calligraphic lines negotiate continuously with negative space through gestures that remain intuitive. The traces of erasure do not simply leave voids; they register blocked information, subtle disruptions that insist on being seen. Through acts of addition and subtraction, Neely emphasizes the necessity of negative space, not as absence, but as a marker of what is missing.
Alongside the canvases, the exhibition includes a series of drawings on paper, where similar tensions are explored on a more intimate scale. Here, intensity and confusion are distilled into a quieter register, allowing the viewer to encounter the instability of language and memory in closer proximity.
If, as Susan Stewart writes, “speech leaves no mark in space,” while writing “leaves its trace, a trace beyond the life of the body,” Neely’s practice aligns painting with this contaminated, persistent form of inscription. Each layer, interruption, and negative space operates as a rebellious, uncontrollable trace: an embodied writing that remains, even as histories are transformed.
"Speech leaves no mark in space; like gesture it exists in its immediate context and can reappear only in another’s voice, another’s body, even if that other is the same speaker transformed by history. But writing contaminates; writing leaves its trace, a trace beyond the life of the body. Thus, while speech gains authenticity, writing promises immortality, or at least the immortality of the material world in contrast to the mortality of the body. Our terror of the unmarked grave is the terror of insignificance of a world without writing. The metaphor of the unmarked grave is one which joins the mute and the ambivalent; without the mark there is no boundary, no point at which to begin the repetition. Writing gives us a device for inscribing space, for inscribing nature: the lovers' names carved in bark, the slogans on the bridge, and the strangely uniform and idiosyncratic hand that has tattooed the subways. Writing serves to capture the world, defining and commenting upon the configurations we choose to textualize. If writing is an imitation of speech, it is also a “script,” as a marking of speech in space which can be taken up through time in varying contexts. The space between letters, the space between words, bears no hesitations of the body; it has only thehesitations of knowing, the hesitations which arise from its place outside history - transcendent yet lacking the substantiating power of context "
Susan Stewart, On Longing. Duke University Press, 1993. p. 31
