Mammarachos: Quinceañera, Perrotin, London, 2026

Argote calls Mamarrachos: Quinceañera - his 2026 exhibition at Perrotin's London gallery - “a special show,” describing an intimacy that’s unusual in his practice. “It's particular because it's not a very big show - it's one room,” he tells me. “It's also a rare show for me, because most of the time I’m working on large-scale installations.” The exhibition marks fifteen years since he first exhibited his Mamarrachos paintings. This is a coming-of-age moment for the series itself, a chance for Argote to look back at a body of work without yet being finished with it.

Argote’s Mamarrachos deal with dynamics of constraint (and his escape from it) that guide much of his working principles. For the series, it's the confines of the canvas's rectangle that Argote absconds from. They start with digitally rendered marks created in seconds - the kind of scribbled line one might make on a phone screen with a careless finger - that are enlarged by a factor of a thousand in the works. The canvas is the ground for these

augmented lines but they refuse to be boxed in; reaching beyond the rectangle, their MDF extensions resisting the categorisation of these works simply as paintings.

The very nature of a gallery exhibition requires a certain level of unavoidable slickness. In Colombia, mamarracho might describe someone who appears messy in a situation where they should be more put together - a child with unkempt hair and an untucked shirt in their grandmother's house. In the refined environment of Perrotin's London gallery, Argote's work is that scruffy kid. His Mamarrachos walk a tightrope: in ways, they're sleek in appearance - at home in the environment in which they hang - whilst still faithful to the scrappy methodologies that birthed them.

Excerpt from Iván Argote's Scruffy Kids by Ben Broome