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Carmen Argote Turns Cochineal’s Extractive History Into a Study of Embodiment

The Guadalajara-born, Los Angeles-based artist transforms cochineal, linen, movement and performance into meditations on sensation, memory and material agency.

There is something deeply physical, almost primordial, that characterizes the work of Guadalajara-born, Los Angeles-based artist Carmen Argote. Materiality and sensoriality are at the heart of her practice, which is an exercise in navigating the physical and emotional interplay that accompanies our relationship with the world. In her soon-to-close show at Silverlens in New York, “Soft Perimeter,” her gradients of red pigments are as vibrant in their tactility as they are visceral in their tonal depths—the body, re-embodied. Argote derives the color from cochineal, a scale insect in the suborder Sternorrhyncha from which the natural dye carmine has traditionally been produced. One of the oldest pigments used in the Americas, dating back as early as the second century B.C., its vibrant hue was symbolic of the gods, the sun and blood. The Maya and Aztecs and Indigenous groups in Oaxaca and Tlaxcala used the insects, known in Nahuatl as nocheztli, to paint murals, color sacred codices and dye textiles. When the Spanish arrived, they established an extractive and highly lucrative trade, shipping tons of dried insects across the Atlantic to color European royal garments and paintings. For Argote, it is a material that embodies both human and natural histories of extraction, as well as their entanglements.

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Everything in the show speaks to transformation and the alchemical processes through which matter transitions between states. Argote’s engagement with cochineal came after experimenting with onions and other natural dyes, she tells Observer. While developing “As Above, So Below,” her 2020 exhibition at the New Museum, she was working with citrus, citric acid and fruit trees, thinking about how one substance can transform another in nature. Cochineal entered naturally into that inquiry: “I was very interested in how one thing could have an impact on another. That is how I came to cochineal. I loved its vibrancy and that orange color.”

"Soft Perimeter" Artist: Carmen Argote Venue: Silverlens Address: 505 West 24th Street, New York City Through: July 31, 2026

Its connection to the body and to sensation, however, only emerged when she started to bring it to a more monumental scale, with a site-specific installation, Me at Market, first presented at the........

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