Jorge Manilla: Only Memories

Artist list

Jorge Manilla

This is not only another history, this is a history of life, of love and death, of feelings and temptations, wild moments, intense moments, moments that make us feel that we are alive…

- Jorge Manilla


Platina welcomes Jorge Manilla from Mexico City to his first exhibition in Sweden.
The exhibition is a great contrast to the light Swedish minimalist idiom. Instead we are invited into an odyssey into the endless void black holes that are simultaneously filled with feelings indescribable in words.



Jorge Manilla’s work challenges us to confront the deepest feelings and fears we usually avoid. It consists a huge production with wild mixtures of touching stories and twisted relationships. The language is special in which experimental solutions are framed by love and religious upbringing.

What we see is the dark side of passion, the hollow interior of a body, torn apart by emotions. The work is dark, twisted and broken forms of cut leather, which is reminiscent of hopeless knots in ones stomach, burning sores or open wounds. The series is a collection of very unusual and unique jewellery pieces with moral and physical anatomy of the human soul. It is a reminder that human strength in the end overcome the sad and wounding moments. It is a reminder that the horrifying, in fact, is insanely beautiful, and sounds of vulnerability are just signs of heroic strength.

Jorge Manilla, the son of a family of Mexican goldsmiths and engravers, studied visual arts at the Academy of San Carlos, in Mexico. He received a highly technical jewellery training at the Academy of Craft and Design from the Mexican Institute of Fine Arts. But it was until he moved to Belgium, years later, where he enrolled at the Karel de Grote Academy in Antwerp, that he was forced to forget about the traditional notion he had to jewellery, to let his technical skills aside and to research about the cultural meaning of jewellery, its conceptual possibilities and to experiment with materials and techniques .

- Sofia Björkman 2012