Review: ‘Traces of an Unseen Fire’ resists presumption through new mythos at MOCAGA

It was hot when I walked in. It wasn’t just the summer heat making my shirt stick to my back but the gallery’s red lights and red walls, paired with unidentifiable noises growing louder and louder that primed me for discomfort. It felt like stepping into the mouth of something primal. I felt myself start to sweat, though maybe that was anticipation or projection.

Traces of an Unseen Fire, Sergio Suárez’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCAGA), is presented in conjunction with their 2024/2025 Working Artist Project. The exhibition combines sculpture, ceramics and carved relief to build a fictional yet spiritually resonant mythos, an excavation site that blurs the lines between time, reverence and ritual. This show rewards the curious, leads quick conclusions to dead ends and leaves those who choose to marvel at his craftsmanship more than satisfied. 

I entered the exhibition carrying my own cultural baggage: red as hell, white as heaven. Those binaries felt useful until they didn’t. The red bristled with symbols, but none of them quite landed where Western eyes might expect. Broken red clay tablets, put together in grids, were re-assembled and not “restored.” The works speak in fragments — some symbols are sharp and declarative, others blurry and stubbornly illegible until your second or third pass. Smoke is rendered as texture. Out of juvenile habit, I yearned to touch it, as if my fingers could understand more than my eyes. 

But it wasn’t all red inside Traces of an Unseen Fire. Near the entrance, spotlit in the white light of the latter half, is a retelling of Prometheus. In the work, fire cascades from the sky like a waterfall and is greeted by a group of figures — humans, deities or maybe something in-between. Their limbs are dismembered yet functional, their heads dislodged and spherical; some reflective, others as black as the slab that holds them. 

Here, I paused. If fire is a gift, divine, falling from above, then what is this red room I’m in? What assumptions do I carry with me? I entered thinking that red meant hell and white meant heaven — or at least some secular cousin of good and evil — but this first piece which mirrors Prometheus’ tale dared me to resist projection. The first of my obsessions is subtly depicted in the background where a twin trapezoidal figure lies dormant.  

In the middle of this red portion of the floor was a reflective ceramics grid, each square composed of ripples. It initially appeared as an oasis from the summer heat, but the ripple forms don’t stop at water. 

Moving deeper into the red-lit space, I encountered a sculpture shaped like an ōllamaliztli goal installed overhead. The Mesoamerican ball game was both a sport and a ritual of life and death, and here Suárez sculpted it as fire. Yet on the floor around it lay familiar companions — varying rocks, fiery forms and those identical haunting spheres that populate the gallery floor and mimic installations under other pieces. Spherical heads matching the bodies in the carvings rest underneath hanging pieces, as if they were disconnected skeletal remains. Or perhaps they were balls used in the sacred game? 

Toward the back of the exhibition, I encountered a white-lit section, a space that initially reads as a relief. But that, too, is a trap. In the white half things become more articulate and detailed but also more brutal. Darker in tone than I have seen from Suárez’s previous work, large black and white carvings depict grand scenes of struggle, pain and rebirth.

Here, light reads not as a mood but as a metaphor. I understood then that red didn’t mean bad and white didn’t mean safe. These colors weren’t symbols for me to decode and obsess over like I did before but rather shaped an environment to navigate. Of course, Suárez wasn’t presenting binaries. By now, I’d begun to think of an alternative meaning for the ripples. Once thought of as salvation, they sit like residue — impressions. Possibly not only rain in the desert but instead the mark left behind after something divine passed through. It was a footprint.  

Still, even amid the gravity of Suárez’s sculptural language, I found myself wishing for a shift — not in formal rigor, which is undeniable — but in how the installation extended that language. The repetition of heads, rocks with smooth intrusions as if the divine rested their heads there and sculptures of fire created a visual chant, one that was easily overlooked. With how often and similarly they were presented, these floor groupings flattened themselves. My mind skipped over them, and their importance was ignored. 

In his work, Suárez uses tangible objects to ground mythos in reality. When the same or similar constellation of forms appears beneath the works, the gesture starts to feel less grand and more akin to a placeholder.

Arguably, my favorite piece in the show features the fire-born ōllamaliztli goal mounted on the wall. This piece is not something “found” like the other artifacts but positioned as though it had always been there. I paused at this piece the longest, not because of its scale but because of what it represented. This symbol is so charged with Mesoamerican cultural and historical weight that I questioned its inclusion. 

With Suárez creating so many different symbols and icons of his own, inventing his own language, I was left wondering: Why this? Why now? In the works, he created an entire mythos of his own with iconography that is both ancient and futuristic and then centered a symbol with a deep, historical real-world lineage. It was loaded.

If this body of work is a re-enactment of archeological findings, as it seems to be, and if indeed Suárez is excavating a past that never was, then the ōllamaliztli goal introduces a specific realness that the rest of the work avoids naming. This made me wonder what it means to adopt the aura of a cultural artifact without anchoring it within a wider archaeological context. 

Suárez, with clear intent, has created a beautifully complex, unambiguous language that forever folds in on itself — revealing more of itself while also hiding its other hand. Playing with time and legibility, the exhibition offers an opportunity to exist between worlds and embodies both discovery and the creation of ritual. Here, rituals aren’t meant to be solved — like heat and pressure, they are meant, instead, to be endured.

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Montenez Lowery is a multidisciplinary Black American artist working in Atlanta, utilizing pinhole photography to explore identity, cultural memory and the complexities of interpersonal relationships. Lowery is interested in photographic material and process and how they can be incorporated to enrich the themes he tackles. Lowery has earned a BFA in photography from the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University. He was awarded The Larry and Gwen Walker Award and shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Awards Student Competition.