Name: Mitologías de un Niño Mexicano
Start: 2025-09-19T19:00:00-07:00
Location: 341 South Avenue 17, 90031

$Mitolog\u00edas de un Ni\u00f1o Mexicano$

(Mythologies of a Mexican Boy)
Vasco Del Rey Solo Exhibition
Opening Reception: 7-10pm Friday September 19th, 2025
Exhibition Dates : September 19th, -October 12th, 2025
Gallery Hours: 12 pm–7 pm, Thursday - Sunday
Wonzimer Gallery, 341 S Avenue 17, Los Angeles 90031
Wonzimer is proud to announce Mythologies of a Mexican Boy, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Vasco Del Rey. Born in southern Mexico and raised in Los Angeles, Vasco has spent the past three years developing a visual language rooted in rupture, ritual, and remembrance. The series exhibited is fueled by the tension between presence and absence—between a Mexico remembered only through childhood memory and a life built far from it. In this space between geographies, Vasco constructs not a narrative but a mythology. Paintings emerge as offerings rather than answers, rich with motifs that resist fixed meaning.
Figures are stripped down and devotional, suspended between tenderness and ache, the personal and universal. The result is not a linear story, but a visual theology shaped by intuition, migration and the quiet insistence to be seen.
At its core, the work grapples with longing—for family left behind, for a home that no longer exists and for a sense of belonging with a fractured identity. Vasco mythologizes the immigrant experience, layering personal history with archetypes. Vasco’s figures appear as vessels, saints, and prayers. They carry both beauty and burden. The body is central: contorted, reaching, weeping, blooming. Often faceless, his figures carry the weight of two homes, two tongues, and the emotional scar tissue of distance. Mythologies of a Mexican Boy is not about nostalgia. It is about what memory does in absence, how it stretches, stains, and sanctifies. A boy’s recollection of his motherland, fused with the strength gained through perseverance, becomes a timeless mythology. Vasco Del Rey’s work is a mythic reconstruction of memory, identity and romance anchored in the psychological weight of the immigrant experience. Wood pallets become a major source of inspiration, the artist finds what was left unseen and transforms them into altars. This act mirrors the immigrant experience itself: the strength to carry without praise, the grace to endure without recognition. In elevating what is often discarded, Vasco offers a quiet reverence for lives built in the shadows, turning survival into a sacred form of expression.
Though deeply personal, this story echoes across countless others—lives marked by displacement, resilience, and love. Vasco does not claim to speak for all, but he aims to paint what many carry silently. In doing so, he hopes to create space for reflection, empathy, and a reimagining of what it means to belong in a world where belonging is never simple. This body of work is a radiant invocation of the enduring mythic spirit woven through all people, histories and cultures - a force that refuses erasure.