ZⓈONAMACO: Mexico City
Overview
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For ZⓈONAMACO 2026, NIL Gallery presents a curated booth bringing together Simon Buret, Malik Thomas Jalil Kydd, and Gommaar Gilliams.
In their practices, painting is not a neutral surface but a site of encounter. Gesture, material, and process operate as languages through which memory, vulnerability, and resistance are negotiated. Moving between chaos and harmony, abstraction and figuration, their works invite a form of looking that is slow, embodied, and attentive.
Simon Buret approaches painting as an intimate and contemplative offering. Shaped by his life across France, Greece, and North Africa among others, his works balance spontaneity and control, strength and fragility. Through layered gestures and the use of unconventional materials such as coffee grounds and grease pencil, Buret creates dense surfaces charged with emotional tension. His paintings function as meditative spaces, where vulnerability becomes a quiet form of resilience.
For Malik Thomas Jalil Kydd, painting unfolds as ritual and reclamation. By replacing the Western canvas with handwoven silk, he embeds cultural and political meaning directly into the work’s foundation. Subjected to processes of dyeing and ritualized purification, these surfaces bear traces of erasure and survival. His use of charcoal introduces a language of residue and persistence, where marks function as acts of remembrance rather than destruction. Often centered on the male figure, his works hover between figuration and abstraction, articulating queer, Christian, and diasporic identities through acts of material transformation and ritualized process.
Gommaar Gilliams understands painting as a language born from silence. Marked in childhood by a stutter, he found in image-making a space beyond speech. Drawing on the idea of a perennial philosophy, his canvases unfold as unstable fields where archetypal figures, animals, and celestial forms emerge and dissolve. Through layering and erasure, Gilliams seeks a fragile equilibrium that reflects a world in constant flux.
Though working across different geographies and material traditions, the three artists share a vision of painting as a transformative act—one that carries emotional, spiritual, and cultural charge.
Works
