portal vegetal is Diego Matus (1999), a visual artist and illustrator originally from Ranchu Gubiña, Unión Hidalgo, Oaxaca. His training includes a specialization in graphic design and visual communication at CalArts, as well as complementary courses in illustration and editorial design.
He has received support such as Xigagueta in 2025, a hybrid and experimental program sponsored by FUNDACIÓN JUMEX ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO. His practice unfolds between painting, drawing and design, articulating thought and intuition in works that explore the link between beings and territories. His solo exhibition Pollen stands out, presented in 2022 at the Galería Gubidxa.
He has worked on illustration and editorial design projects, developing various publications that combine his artistic practice with the visual mediation of printed and digital content. He currently lives and works in his native community, in southwestern Mexico, developing pictorial projects that investigate interconnectivity.
I work mainly with painting, exploring how form, color and gesture can generate experiences of contemplation and sensitive connection. I understand the image from a holistic vision, as a bridge between the body and the living, a language capable of activating sensitive, non-linear and deeply situated modes of knowledge. I am interested in opening possible worlds in which tradition and contemporaneity coexist.
Illustration and design are complementary extensions of this practice, which allow me to transfer ideas and organize my visual materials. Oil and acrylic works arise from the collection of drawings and words. This process is maintained in constant dialogue with visual research, symbolic reading and material experimentation.
My mother tongue is Zapotec, a deep root that runs through my personal and collective history. Although I do not speak it fluently, I have begun to name my projects in Zapotec as an act of learning, vindication and affection. This gesture of naming from my language is also a way to heal a cultural wound, to build an intimate relationship with the language that my grandmothers spoke and to create bridges between memory, identity and creation. The words in Zapotec not only name, but summon worlds.
My influences come mainly from nature and the Binnizá worldview, to enable a space of presence where the spiritual and the material meet; an exercise in fertile attention that proposes deeper relationships between the human and its environment.