Echoes of Haworth: JoCa's Solo Exhibition in Roma Norte

Events & Exhibitions · Mexico City

JoCa opens a solo exhibition in Roma Norte on 17 September, curated by Rafael Pérez y Pérez. The opening is by invitation; the show is open to the public from Friday 18 September.

By Josh Stein · Founder, Art of NOMA, Mexico City · writing on the emerging-art market since 2023

What the show is

The title points to Haworth, the Yorkshire village where the Brontë sisters lived and wrote — a small, weather-bitten place that produced an unreasonable share of the English literary imagination. It is an unexpected reference for a Mexican-Spanish painter working in Mexico City, and the show does not try to make it a literal one.

What carries over is the atmosphere: figures held in mist, identity that refuses to resolve, the sense of a person half-remembered rather than observed. In the gallery's own description, Echoes of Haworth explores memory and identity through fragmented, blurred portraits — images suspended between the recognisable and the uncertain, like memories that surface and then fade.

That is a precise description of what JoCa has been building toward. The non finito approach — the deliberately unfinished, a technique inherited from Michelangelo's unreleased figures and put to a contemporary purpose — has run through the work for years. Faces fracture, dissolve and reassemble. Nothing is allowed to settle into a likeness.

If you have seen JoCa's earlier series, the shift here is in subject rather than method. The unfinished is no longer about identity under construction. It is about memory, which is unfinished by nature.

Two dates, and which one is yours

This is the detail most listings get wrong, so it is worth stating plainly. There are two separate dates and they are not the same event.

If you were not invited to the Thursday reception, nothing is lost. Openings are for the room, not for the work — they are crowded, the light is wrong, and you spend the evening talking. The Friday onward is when the show can actually be looked at.

Where, and when it is open

ArtLatinou sits at Colima 29 in Roma Norte, in the middle of the Colima strip and within walking distance of most of the neighbourhood's galleries. Roma Norte is the densest gallery district in Mexico City, so this is a show that can be folded into an afternoon rather than made a special trip for.

The hours above are the gallery's standard listed hours, recorded in Mexico's national Sistema de Información Cultural. Galleries frequently vary their hours during an exhibition run, and this one had not published exhibition-specific hours at the time of writing — worth a message before you go if you are making a dedicated trip.

One practical warning. The gallery's own domain, artlatinou.com, does not currently resolve to a working site. The most reliable channel for hours and updates is the gallery's Instagram, @art_latinou.

The year that led here

JoCa — Mexican-Spanish, born 1984, with artistic studies in Vancouver — has had an unusually compressed year, and this exhibition sits at the end of it rather than the start.

Two shows closing on the same Sunday and a third opening eighteen days later is a demanding schedule for any painter. It also means Echoes of Haworth is the only place to see JoCa's work in person right now.

The work

Winter's Morning (1) shows what the title of the exhibition is reaching for. A woman stands in a pale pleated dress before a lake and a treeline dissolving into fog. Her dress is painted with almost uncomfortable precision — every fold in the fabric resolved — and her face is not there at all, erased by hair caught in a movement the painting refuses to finish.

The contrast is the argument. The parts of a memory that survive are often the wrong ones: the fabric, the weather, the light on the water. The face, which is the part you were trying to keep, is the first thing to go.

Who made it happen

The exhibition is curated by Rafael Pérez y Pérez, who also curated JoCa's museum solo in Mérida — a continuity that matters, since this show reads as the argument of that one carried into a commercial space. Production and management are by Napkin71, led by Paulina Villarreal.

It is presented at ArtLatinou with a group of collaborators: Art of NOMA, Scielo MX, Napkin71, Galo Guilmar Studio, Artists Container and Mezcal Verde Amarás.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• ArtLatinou — exhibition announcement, dates, curator and management credits
• JoCa — artist's own channel
• Sistema de Información Cultural, Secretaría de Cultura — gallery address and listed opening hours
• Art of NOMA on Artsy — Neon Reveries dates and artist biography

Details were confirmed on 1 September 2026 from the exhibition's own announcement. A closing date has not been published. Exhibition dates and hours change; confirm with the gallery before travelling.