Melania Toma

INTEGUMENT
August 9, 2025

Colector is pleased to present Melania Toma’s second solo show with the gallery, for the first time on site at the Monterrey space, Integument: a new body of work by the Italian, London-based artist, that is centered around the space between the outer coverings and inner structures of the body, be those of skin, shell, membrane, fur, rind or other external sheath. From the Latin integumentum, meaning “a covering” and the protective layer present in animals and plants, the exhibition’s title Integument explores the multilayered plane in which one can go one or a thousand layers beneath the surface to find sanctuary or protection.

Integument serves as a natural continuation of Toma’s earlier exhibition this year Porous Bodies. Using the Porous Bodies’ mural Pelle as a starting point, Integument touches and profoundly dives into the ‘skin’ aspect as a threshold. Pelle thus becomes the primary link between the two shows, one as continuation of the other and inextricable from the same.

Where Porous Bodies is concerned with permeability and the leakings, seepings and ejections of the body, Integument opens the portal towards a journey into the skin, where the body is reimagined as an entity of protection. As Rosi Braidotti’s idea of post-humanist assemblage body details, the body “is no longer restricted to a purely biological or anthropocentric definition. It becomes a network of relations that includes human and non-human actors, technological media, animals, plants, and the environment.”

One of these recent works, Peace Paloma (or the Underneath) can be defined as Toma’s pictorial depiction of the current social and political environment the world is subject to. It is an evidently visceral and ritualistic landscape where a bird-like figure soars above the chaos and emerges both as a strong force and a symbol of peace, honoring the inner life – deepest layer – of everything that surrounds us.

Toma’s smaller-scale Flare painting shows the audience another type of creature that energetically flies, personifying the constant telluric movement beneath the surface of each human and the world as a whole. In Toma’s words “it is a nervous system revolt, a peaceful overstimulation.”

The intimate and dreamlike painting Sentinel (or Night Garden) displays a nocturnal scene, filled with depictions of life at its most cellular, bacterial level, becoming an almost botanical work where Toma’s endless unearthing of connections between the human body and nature is evident. It is a work that embodies endless cycles, it mourns at the same time it honors, it is fertile at the time it shows decay and it projects regeneration as an inadvertent moment of unhealing.

Sentinel (or Night Garden) serves an ancestral presence in this body of work, strongly connected to the Skinkeeper cowhide painting, where both of these works portray guardians that hold close the stories their skins tell through scars, etchings, textures and movements. Skinkeeper on its part is the first of its kind in Toma’s range of work. It is crafted and created from a discarded object (cowhide) that proved an extremely uncomfortable and problematicmedium for the artist. In it, one can admire in its engraving a tree-of-life figure, a certain kind of map that encompasses Toma’s research of the merging between multilayered planes, and how her work holds open the infinite gateways into an ecosystemical world.

As guardians in this exhibition, Sentinel and Skinkeeper, hold space for birth and decay. They’re the external component of the figures between exposure and protection, where paintings like Flare and Peace Paloma, dive into the movement and transformation occurring beneath these surfaces of shelter and under the witness of protectors.

Integument challenges the static notion of a protective membrane as a simple veil through its lively, vulnerable and porous depictions where one can find that a shield can also be a site of transformation, rupture, creation and intimacy. The refuge is present throughout these works as Toma makes spectators question whether the opening of the skin – a wound – could lead to a haven of self-preservation. Can we, through vulnerability, openness, tenderness, find this sacred space and would this wound be a portal that enhances our capacity of transformation and protection.

- Colector