Luis Fernando Zanches

Born and based in Mexico City, Luis Fernando Zanches fills his work with eyes, warriors, totems, human figures, and vivid color. Contradictions keep him moving: peace and chaos, beauty and discomfort, destruction and repair. When something appears broken, he feels an urge to work with it. On a beach in Puerto Escondido, he gathered discarded rope and driftwood and turned them into figures.

Zanches was training to become a lawyer when meningitis left him deaf in one ear in 2013. The experience made him reconsider the life he was building. He finished his degree, but a summer spent painting in London—and an exhibition on Brick Lane—led him back to Mexico to pursue art. During the pandemic, his practice took a more spiritual turn. Dreams, grief, nature, and the possibility of transformation now run through his work.

He says he can communicate with animals and has a particular affection for forests, snakes, spiders, and strange bugs. His studio ritual is less mystical: make an enormous mess while painting, then clean it with extraordinary precision.

Work at Call Me Lola

In Batallas que florecen (Battles That Bloom), flowers grow from streams of red. Eyes appear across the canvas, bearing witness as wounds become the ground for new life. The work considers sublimation: how painful experiences can change form over time without being erased.

For Zanches, these battles are personal, spiritual, and collective. The painting holds the struggle and its possible transformation in the same image, asking what might grow from what we have endured.

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