A World of Portals - Estefania Mongrell’s Artspace

The portal on display when entering Mongrell's gallery in Fábrica La Aurora shows an ornate arch, framed by mosaics and trailing plants. On the other side, a path opens through wild vegetation toward distant mountains. Terracotta tiles beneath your feet, you are standing at the threshold, the world beyond waiting to be explored. The muted colors of the acrylic painting blend into the old industrial stone walls behind it. Presented on a simple wooden easel, without imposing itself, the piece forms a quiet anchor in the space.

The artist carefully researches the ecosystems she paints: plants that grow in a region, animals that inhabit those spaces. She makes catalogs by climate zone, visits Charco del Ingenio, San Miguel's botanical garden, to photograph insects and flowers up close. "I say I'm a frustrated biologist," Mongrell laughs, "or a frustrated architect. My paintings are where I get to be both - without the responsibility of anything collapsing."

Once she has built the landscape, she likes to introduce something unexpected. Elements appear where they do not usually belong. Often, these are connected to the sea. "I always lived near water," Mongrell says. "Since I came here, I have started to dream about the ocean." The marine life that drifts through her canvases - the whales, the herons - are her wandering mind finding its way back.

Visiting Estefania Mongrell's world, you can easily find yourself transported. One step across the threshold, and suddenly you are at the seaside, in a vast agave landscape, or at the foot of a mountain. Just don't be surprised if a whale flies past. In Mongrell's art, that is entirely imaginable. "I like to think that my pieces open a portal. A place you can go to and come back from - somewhere between dreams and reality," the artist explains.

When she first arrived in San Miguel eight years ago, Mongrell was already painting plants, landscapes and mountains in many forms. But the city opened something new in her art. "Here, almost everything is hidden. It's like there are worlds behind every door that you can't imagine," she says. A mosaic doorway here, an arch framing an unexpected patio there - it was the many thresholds Mongrell crossed in the city that inspired her work. Initially, she had come for two weeks. Within one, she knew she was staying.

Mongrell opened her own studio in Fábrica La Aurora in 2025, having already established a presence on the grounds through collaborations and in shared gallery spaces over the previous years. "It really helped me to mix with many people here and understand that everyone has the freedom to create what they want," she says of the community she found in what she calls the "factory of dreamers”. Today, she moves through the studio as if she had never worked anywhere else. The walls are covered in drawings – plant catalogs, animal studies, architectural details. There are sketches of whales captured part by part; herons drawn from every angle, until Mongrell knew their anatomy well enough to paint them without a reference.

The artist refers to the studio as her curiosity cabinet - a living archive of ideas that keeps growing. Here, the works exhibited in her adjacent gallery come to life. The gallery extends on a long corridor, near the factory’s main entrance. It blends into the halls of the old industrial complex, anchored by a giant iron textile machine at its center. From here, Mongrell's pieces begin their journey into the world. Many of her clients are visitors to Fábrica La Aurora: people who walk through her gallery, cross the threshold into her studio, and find themselves drawn into the artist’s creative universe.

“What I find most interesting about the open studio is the different sorts of encounters I make”, says Mongrell. “People come through the corridor, they see the work and they experience something. Many connect with a landscape, they feel it - some say it reminds them of a memory they have of another place.”

In just a few months, Mongrell’s artspace in Fábrica la Aurora has become exactly what her paintings promise: a space for dreams; a portal into another world.

One of Mongrell's Portals to Another World, on Display in her Gallery

Mongrell in her Studio in La Fábrica Aurora