Carmen Argote

In you are not late (2022), Carmen Argote assembles banana peel, cochineal, seeds, handwritten notes, and layered marks into a composition that feels suspended between reassurance and instability. The work unfolds as an intimate accumulation of traces — fragments of thought, gestures, stains, and organic matter that resist fixed hierarchy or resolution. Rather than presenting a singular image, Argote constructs a porous field where emotional residue, memory, and material transformation coexist in delicate tension.

Embedded within the surface, the banana peel operates as both remnant and witness. Detached from the fruit and incorporated into the pictorial plane, it carries associations of nourishment, consumption, waste, and bodily vulnerability. As the organic material dries and changes over time, the work itself becomes subject to processes of transformation and decay. Argote’s use of the peel refuses permanence, allowing the material instability of the banana to shape the emotional and temporal logic of the piece. The title’s quiet affirmation — you are not late — acquires particular resonance within this context, suggesting care extended across fragile states of becoming.

Born in Guadalajara and based in Los Angeles, Argote frequently works with ephemeral materials to explore intimacy, migration, and forms of emotional inheritance. In you are not late, the layering of organic residue and personal notation suggests that memory is never linear or complete, but instead accumulates through fragments, repetitions, and acts of tending. The banana peel becomes a subtle but charged material presence through which broader questions of vulnerability, domesticity, and transience emerge. The work ultimately proposes slowness, permeability, and impermanence as conditions through which care might still be possible.