About Erika Cárdenas

Erika Cárdenas (1996, Mexico). Lives and works in Paris.

Erika Cárdenas is a Mexican visual artist, born and raised in Mexico City. She began her artistic training in visual arts at the Centro de Arte Mexicano, followed by specialized studies at the Escuela Activa de Fotografía and the Taller de Arte Contemporáneo de México. She later completed a master’s degree in Visual Culture, Conservation, and Contemporary Art at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Her artistic practice focuses primarily on painting, while also incorporating printmaking as a complementary medium.

Her pictorial research explores the relationship between space, memory, and matter, drawing on multidisciplinary approaches from philosophy, poetry, geography, and geology. She paints to trace matter within memory, to observe how past gestures remain on the surface and evoke the way memory overlays our perception of the world. Each layer in her paintings is an imprint of what has been and continues to resonate. She does not seek to represent, but to allow things to reveal themselves through proximity and context—letting the painting speak through its own marks and show how things coexist and transform.

Painting thus becomes a threshold that articulates space and time, marking rhythms and transitions that possess their own temporality: a living time that marks, preserves, and accumulates. Through this process, she seeks to capture those places where each pictorial trace reflects the paradoxical attempt of the finite to contain the infinite.