In Good Company
by Luz Massot

Carolina Pimenta’s practice unfolds in a constant and fertile tension: on one side, an intimate exploration of identity; on the other, a bold immersion into new territories and the complexity of social interaction. For her third exhibition at Nuno Centeno, these two currents converge in a body of work born from her experience in Mexico. The work does not seek to document a country, but to choreograph a series of encounters where the boundaries between self, other, and environment dissolve into an instinctive and vibrant energy.
With a life trajectory that has taken her across different geographies, Pimenta arrives in Mexico not as a distant observer, but as an active participant in its daily pulse. Her method is almost an extension of her way of life: compulsive photography that records both day and night. This reflective process, a constant search for liberation, materialises in a visual archive that works as a memory machine, a device questioning the construction of memory in the age of the global image.
The exhibition In Good Company is a deep immersion into memory, identity, and community – pillars of her artistic practice. The title not only refers to the figures portrayed but also to the artist’s intrinsic relationship with Mexico, which has become both companion and muse, transforming the everyday into visual poetry. Themes such as play, intimacy, and humour invite reflection on the beauty and chaos of contemporary life. With echoes of performative practices where the body became a vehicle for artistic action, Pimenta uses it as an intimate map of vulnerability and rawness.
With her ever-present camera in hand, she captures the texture of skin, the tension of a muscle, the trace of a long night. There is a sensuality and fragility that recalls Nan Goldin’s radical closeness, where the work becomes a map of stories and affections. These are images that do not define an identity, but capture the feeling of being alive in a context at once chaotic, tender, and hostile. They are stolen instants, unrepeatable actions that, though foreign, breathe an uncanny familiarity.
At the same time, the city reveals itself as an open theatre. Following a tradition that stretches from street photography to conceptual typologies, the artist turns away from the monumental to find visual poetics in saturation and excess. By embracing the vital disorder of Latin America, her gaze transforms asphalt and anonymous facades into compositions where the sublime erupts into the banal. It is here that her universe, nostalgic yet radically contemporary, takes shape.
Perhaps the sharpest gesture lies in the treatment of the postcards. It is a brilliant game: postcards you cannot take with you, an acid commentary on public image and collecting. By transforming an ephemeral object into a work of art, Carolina makes us question who is an icon, why they are, and how we consume the image of others. It is a nod to the tradition of portraiture – from Roman busts to Warhol’s pop – but with a mordant, thoroughly contemporary twist.
In Good Company is a journey through Carolina Pimenta’s gaze: one that finds beauty in imperfection, poetry in the urban, and profound humanity in every fragment of skin. Her work does not aim to be a documentary portrait but rather a memory machine, a visual essay, a choreography of connection that seeks to capture the pulse of a Mexico that is wild, surreal, tender, and tough; a place that does not bend, but survives, adapts, and thrives. It is in this collision of joy and pain, survival and desire, that the artist seeks to immobilise the essence of a country that has transformed her.