Diana Padilla (CDMX, 1990), has a MAS in curatorship and art theory from the zürcher hochschule der kunste and a BFA in visual arts from the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. Padilla's work is made up of pictorial exercises crossed by shades of monochromatic blue. In her series The blues series (2020) and The blues series II (2020) she seeks to reflect on some of the traits that we associate with madness and its treatments (some of them which can be heartbreaking) that came to surround it. In some of her works, the artist hand write with brush and paint, word by word, the different definitions of these mental "conditions", a process that works as a sort of catharsis in which each concept is internalized, to try to understand it clinically, also using caricature figures in the paintings to try to cover the coldness with which the diagnosis are written.

Diana Padilla's work investigates the notion of madness through pictorial exercises where monochromatic blue shows portraits of psychiatric hospital patients from the beginning of the last century, and in the same way, characters from cartoons and descriptions of diagnoses of the so-called mental pathologies. Padilla's explorations can function as a tool to analyze the psychiatric institution as an apparatus that articulates and activates the mechanisms of Western and patriarchal hegemony, which once again apprehends science as a supposedly "neutral" and "objective" matrix. In particular, during the early days of psychiatry, the diagnoses that invalidated bodies, existences and experiences appear as verdicts, at moments arbitrary, that evidence one of the main models that guide the structural framework of most of our societies, which seems to materialize in the form of a white, heterosexual, cis, valid, bourgeois man. Thus revealing the failed character of universalism and science as a paradigm of "neutrality". Diana Padilla's most recent work places her corpus in the archives of the Vilardebó Hospital in Uruguay and La Castañeda in Mexico, examining the drifts of psychiatric application in Latin America.

— Ivonne Dubois