Rayos Magos, Ancestral Download, Moth Belly Gallery
By Hugh Leeman
In Ancestral Download, Rayos Magos combines the logos of global consumer products with Indigenous Mesoamerican iconography, transforming Moth Belly Gallery into a site of visual syncretism. His compositions traverse nearly three millennia of art history, from Olmec sculpture and Mexica pictographic iconography to mid-century Chicano aesthetics, as well as today's well-known corporate brands, turning the act of looking into a reflection on what it means to inhabit multiple worlds. Magos's layered canvases read like illuminated codices for the digital age: visual archives where histories, mythologies, and marketing coexist in dynamic tension.
For Magos, a third-generation Mexican-American, painting operates as a form of visual storytelling inspired by the ancient traditions of Mesoamerica. His dense, flattened picture planes recall codices, early American manuscripts that used equally flattened pictograms, from the ancient Maya to the Mexica, to record histories, myth, and cultural memory. Magos’s paintings could operate as an ethnographic encyclopedia of Mexico's visual culture while evoking the contemporary cacophony of consumer branding to offer commentary on the blending of social identity. "My work is multiversed, multilayered, multidisciplinary, and introspective," he explains. "It speaks to cultural identity and weaves a narrative about who I am."[1]
Inside the artist’s studio
Beyond ancient symbology, Magos draws from modern Mexico's urban vernacular traditions, particularly the rótulos, hand-painted commercial signs whose humor and bold color long animated cityscapes. Once an attribute of working-class expression, the rótulo has recently faced erasure through corporate "whitewashing" campaigns designed to standardize urban aesthetics. By incorporating rótulo motifs into his canvases, Magos honors their history of coloring urban aesthetics. The artist says of the exhibition, "Over the span of this series, I have been reading about Mesoamerican groups, how they structured their societies, how they wrote and documented their belief systems. I have a linguist book that breaks down the symbols used in Nahuatl, the original language of the Mexica (Aztecs). You could say I am an anthropologist-social-psychologist-historian. I really like learning about the past as a way to understand modern times."[1]
El Frijol de La Madre Corazón (The Bean of The Mother Heart)
20"x24" Acrylic Painting on Canvas. Made in 2025.
Visually similar to the rótulos, Magos incorporates the rich folk art traditions of La Lotería, a card game of chance associated with social gatherings in Mexico, tracing its history to Spain and Italy.[2] Often, the elite would play the game during the colonial era before adoption by the working class. The artist's direct reference, seen in El Frijol de La Madre Corazón (The Bean of The Mother Heart) through the lotto card El Corazón (The Heart) makes a layered commentary of the historical blending of identity, further indicated when set aside La Virgen de Guadalupe (The Virgin of Guadalupe), the most widely reproduced image in Mexican art history and one of the most revered and viewed images in the world which tells the story of blending Indigenous culture, narrative, and imagery with Catholicism and Spanish colonization.[3]
Magos recontextualizes The Virgin of Guadalupe as being literally consumed by the Mesoamerican Feathered Serpent, indicating the indigenous cultures of Mexico's consumption of a new brand of thinking and identity: colonialism’s Catholicism. Art history is further referenced through the prayer hands common in Catholic Mexican folk art, countering the Indigenous man recalled from a codex, all cast in the bold colors, which evoke Mexico's rich history of muralism. This menagerie of influence and pop art aesthetic draws parallels with contemporary Mexican and American artists, such as Enrique Chagoya, whose codices and Esther Hernández's Sun Mad (1982) also incorporate pop culture references and visual wit to expose contradictions, injustices, and absurdities.
Pesado (Heavy)
20"x24" Acrylic Painting on Canvas. Made in 2025.
Magos' stories and messages occasionally resemble emojis that, when contextualized through the show title Ancestral Download, one can read the tension of a past informing the present while the present exerts its influence of interpretation on the past. In Pesado (Heavy), the titular script recalls the typeface associated with Chicano lowrider culture. Beneath the text, a laborer drags a hand cart weighted down by ancient cultural icons. Carrying the stone sculptures of multiple Mesoamerican cultures alludes to the burden of representation and the nebulous nature of identity. Humorously, the sculptures of the past are stacked beside a box of popular Mexican brand beer, Modelo (Model). The brand's name plays on the irony that we are witnessing a model of labor and the burden of carrying cultural memory and its expectations into the modern world. Pesado's simple design and composition contrast with the complex cultural weight of Mexican history, both romanticized and stigmatized.
Joyero con Joyas de Calidad (The Jeweler with Quality Jewels)
20"x24" Acrylic Painting on Canvas. Made in 2025.
The influence of Rasquache, a Chicano artistic sensibility that evolved from the resourcefulness of making art from basic materials to blend Mexican traditions with American life,[4] is evident throughout the exhibit's artworks; it is most clearly illustrated in the painting, Joyero con Joyas de Calidad (The Jeweler with Quality Jewels). A street vendor sells plastic inflatable toys and balloons of ancient cultural symbols; his presence separates the words Joyero, Joyas, and Calidad, recalling hand-painted signage of jewelry stores in working-class communities. The vendor's DIY resourcefulness is both a financial necessity and a sense of pride, suggesting these elements often comprise the hyphen in Mexican-American.
Cristal Fritos Baile (Crystal Fried Dance)
20"x24" Acrylic Painting on Canvas. Made in 2025.
Like all other elements the viewer is downloading in Magos' paintings of layered cultural meaning, color takes on particular significance. Each painting's background in rich yellow recalls corn's prehistoric connection to Mexico. The staple crop of Mesoamerica is Magos' recurring motif, referencing the food that many of the region's greatest cultures relied upon and revered through gods. In Cristal Fritos Baile (Crystal Fried Dance), an ancient Teotihuacan mask, some scholars suggest is an early ancient reference to a corn god in the Americas,[5] [6] is crowned by the new corn god of the Americas, Frito-Lay's corn chips.
Rayos Magos Ancestral Download takes viewers on a visual journey through the art, styles, and symbolism of the Americas, telling stories of how the past blends with the present under the pressure of circumstance to create something altogether unique. Embodying this, the artist says, "I love the ability to create something from nothing. This to me has always been a magical process. Therefore, I consider myself a magician/alchemist because I can take various materials and slap them together and make something new."[1] Such alchemy of syncretism, often associated with religion, as we see through Magos' paintings, is intrinsically interwoven in Mexican-American cultural identity. While offering social commentary and cultural insights backdropped by the dark clamor of today's cultural wars, Magos provides respite from the labor of trumpeting ideology through inviting us to consider the complexity of what we download with nuanced introspection and the ability to laugh at the absurdity of our present.
References:
Belly, M. (2025, October 1). Studio Visit & Interview With Rayos Magos — Moth Belly Gallery. Moth Belly Gallery. https://www.mothbelly.org/studio-visits-articles/studio-visit-interview-with-rayos-magos
¡Lotería! — MOLAA | Museum of Latin American Art. (n.d.). MOLAA | Museum of Latin American Art. https://molaa.org/loteria
Kilroy-Ewbank, L. (n.d.). Smarthistory – Virgin of Guadalupe. https://smarthistory.org/virgin-of-guadalupe/
Rasquachismo : a Chicano sensibility · ICAA Documents Project · ICAA/MFAH. (n.d.). https://icaa.mfah.org/s/en/item/845510#?c=&m=&s=&cv=1&xywh=-1136%2C-1%2C3927%2C2198
Stone mask from Teotihuacan in Mexico. (2023, November 22). Uffizi Galleries. https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/mask-teotihuacan
Teotihuacan artist(s) - Mask - Teotihuacan - The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (n.d.). https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/307771
