Paola Chapa Arciniega

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Paola Chapa is a contemporary symbolic artist and a published author of fiction and poetry. Based in Madrid, with deep roots in Mexico and London, her practice explores identity, lineage, and relational belonging through a pictorial language that moves between the visible and the symbolic.

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Drawing from diverse symbolic frameworks—including the Zapotec concepts of tonalism and the nahual as a spiritual counterpart—her work reflects on memory and transformation as relational experiences rather than fixed identities.

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Working primarily through painting, she constructs layered images where personal and collective histories intersect. This multidisciplinary approach was first explored in her published fiction collection, Obturador y Diafragma (Shutter and Diaphragm), where the literary and the visual converge. Her work proposes painting as a space of symbolic continuity across geographies, engaging with questions of transnational identity and inherited narratives.