Penitencia: Softness, Guilt, and the Violence of Memory

For visual artist Thania Diaz, the easy route was never an option. But following her passions has allowed her to create her own world in which she’s safe to express her innermost feelings. In her upcoming exhibition Penitencia at Salon Silicon in Mexico City, Diaz reflects on familial, cultural, and religious images from her upbringing through her childhood eyes, highlighting the tension between polarities: pain and joy, life and death, beauty and discomfort. 

Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, Diaz was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, her family being the first in her town to follow the religion. “I think it made me really witty because I had to demonstrate what I thought,” she recalls. “I was diagnosed with autism at thirty-two years old, so I think that autistic people question everything and I would find a lot of dissonances or discrepancies in what they were teaching me”. She read the Bible a few times in order to use it against people in arguments, questioning the contradictions she was noticing. This innate curiosity and yearning for more led her to move to Mexico City with only 4000 Pesos to pursue her artistic passions. The first woman in her family to move away in order to start her life as opposed to getting married or having a child, Diaz had to earn the respect of her family through hard work. “Artist people don’t like to hear this but I was a publicist… for like 3 years,” Diaz laughs. “And I was like, did I go out of my homeland Chihuahua to come here to Mexico City to be working until 4 AM for these evil corporations that I was the head creative for? I was earning a good wage but I was feeling so depressed.” She studied hairdressing before going to college, but working at a salon she discovered a sensory discomfort of hair touching her. “Ahora ya se que es porque soy autista pero deje de hacer pelo por eso… desarrolló una fobia rara, y entonces pues ya me quede solo maquillando y maquillando.”

 

Working in a field that allowed her to use her artistic skills helped her move forward. “Cuando empecé a hacer maquillaje, no sabía bien de productos, lo hacía muy como ‘si se dibujar pues voy a dibujar en la cara de gente y voy a ganar dinero’. Fue la necesidad lo que me inspiró.” During the pandemic, she was making playeras with her signature faces on them that took off. Eventually, she pulled back on those in lieu of making and selling her own paintings. “Siempre hago muchas cosas a la vez, hago el arte, y luego hago maquillaje para películas, estudie efectos especiales, me especialicé mucho… I feel fortunate that I can work in things that I enjoy.” For Diaz, remaining flexible while maintaining her unique vision allowed her to find opportunities in a variety of artistic mediums, all of which constantly inform each other, but with her visual art always in the driver’s seat. “I think the art inspires me to do better makeup. Because for me, makeup is very expressive and everything and it’s another form of artwork. I like to use it not to make someone beautiful but to make someone interesting.”

Her influences are another avenue through which Diaz explores multiplicity, working through childhood memories and traumas while exploring the human psyche. The faces she creates are detached from the body, so as not to signify any particular race or body type. The women in her family are a big influence, as emotions from her childhood unconsciously conjure up these childlike features. In her abstract work, she’s inspired by her time at her family’s old ranch. “They would kill a pig every year, and the kids were the ones that were in charge of cleaning the visceras. So the colors, a lot of them are like organs, azul bajito, morado, rosa,” she laughs. “Yo me ponía muy triste cuando mataban a los animales incluso hay un video de mi así que gritando de qué ‘don’t do it!’… Se me hacía muy impresionante que fuera tan bonito los colores y tan feo lo que estaba pasando.” These organic sources not only inspire Diaz in her use of color, but also in form. “Formas del cielo de Chihuahua, y de bacterias, y de hongos y de cosas así. Like microscopic shit.” 

The last and strongest theme in Penitencia is the exploration of guilt, particularly in feminine figures. “I think as a woman it’s hard to detach from feeling guilty a bunch of times without any fucking reason you know? You’re always performing to agradar, to please.” She reflects that as a woman in the Jehovah’s Witnesses “you have to be knowledgeable, you’re gonna be the one that’s knocking on the doors, but you can’t have any place of power.” Strong religious symbolism and juxtaposition further pushes this dichotomy. “The faces look very virginal, innocent, and I think that’s related to my religious upbringing, but I’m also gonna have a buttplug in the expo so I always try to clash the figures of the unreachable virgin woman contrasted with the other things that are expected from women… and how it is to be trying to exist between those two figures.” Although Diaz wasn’t baptised herself and thus avoided the shunning that comes with the religion, her sister was. “She was abused, and they protected the guy and shit like that, so I have a very bad relationship with religious upbringings or religious doctrinas. Como que me caga las religiones que tratan de adoctrinar o que condicionan tu comportamiento. Y pienso que de ahí viene mucho la culpa de que como mujeres siempre ha sido condicionado nuestro comportamiento. Si no eres agradable o si no tienes algo que aportar en question de servicio o de belleza, o de cualquier otro tipo, entonces tienes que ser muy inteligente para contrarrestar, or you have to like balance yourself between all of these options to be validated or accepted.”

 

Inherently, Diaz sees guilt as very feminine, and the way women process it, almost religious. Her work asks “what comes after the guilt, and how do you redeem yourself from it?” She continues, “it’s not that you stop feeling guilty, it’s that you take out the importance of that moment and just process it, and try to live with it. And I think men- or masculine figures- when you process guilt in a more masculine way, I think you really just detach from guilt and try to archive it somewhere, instead of making acts to redeem yourself, I don’t know, maybe I’m generalizing.” Diaz wants her art to make the viewer question themselves about what guilt is and where it comes from. Although her perspective is her own, her work allows us to analyze that guilt can sometimes come from internal sources rather than just external, and is incredibly personal. 

“I made my grandma’s house how I remember it como un plano arquitectónico, visto desde arriba, y la casa de mi abuela cerámica, y creo que eso sí está muy dedicado a mi abuela y a todas las mujeres de mi familia. Mi abuela siempre decía “con gracia y con buen juicio, lo que sea que hagas hazlo con gracia y con buen juicio”.

By Haydeé Garrote
Photos by Tatsumi Matsumoto