Image: Aura Galerias, Mexico City
Aura Galerías is presenting ‘El Mole’, a 2026 work by Didier Mayés, as part of a new online selection of his recent pieces made in encaustic and oil. The gallery’s description places the work within a focused look at Mayés’s technique-driven practice, which returns to encaustic after more than two thousand years of history in painting with hot wax. ‘El Mole’ is listed as encaustic and oil on canvas on wood, measuring 100 x 200 cm.
The work is described as a dense field of black marks over honey-colored wax, with “dozens of black signs” crowding the surface until there is “no air left.” Aura Galerías characterizes the image as a census rather than a dish, writing that mole appears “not as a dish but as a census — everything that fits in the pot and everything that fits in a village.” The gallery adds that each white dot is “a puncture made while the wax was still soft,” emphasizing the physical process behind the image and the way the surface is built through incisions and interruption.
The presentation sits within a larger explanation of encaustic, a medium the gallery says was used by the Greeks and described by Pliny the Elder in the first century. It also cites the Fayum funerary portraits from Egypt, whose colors remain vivid after two millennia, and notes a Mexican precedent in Diego Rivera’s first mural, ‘La Creación’ (1922), painted in encaustic at the Anfiteatro Simón Bolívar of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. Aura Galerías uses this context to frame Mayés’s work as part of a long and technically demanding tradition.
Mayés is identified by the gallery as an artist from Oaxaca, born in 1968. According to the source material, he trained at the School of Fine Arts of the UABJO, studied industrial design from 1989 to 1993, and completed further training in the ceramics workshop of maestro Juan Alberu, with guidance from maestros Francisco Monterrosa and Liborio Navarrete. The gallery says that since his first solo exhibition in 1997 he has shown in Mexico, the United States, Colombia, Venezuela, Switzerland, and Japan, and that his work has been presented at the Museo Universitario Casa de los Muñecos in Puebla.
Alongside ‘El Mole’, the same presentation includes ‘En el Patio’, another 2026 encaustic-and-oil work of the same size, and ‘De Carnaval’, a 2026 work measuring 80 x 180 cm. The gallery also presents ‘Los Egresados’, a 2026 oil painting on canvas measuring 100 x 300 cm, described as a three-meter grid containing 75 portraits. In the gallery’s account, that work shifts from wax to pure oil and expands the color range into magenta, lime green, turquoise, and orange.
Aura Galerías notes that it presented Mayés’s solo exhibition ‘Recuerdos de mi Infancia’ in 2017. In the current material, the gallery emphasizes the artist’s use of point, line, and color to build a vocabulary of signs that is “seemingly simple and deliberately childlike.” The page also states that an encaustic surface must be seen in person because light transforms it entirely, and offers viewers the option to request pricing or schedule a visit.
