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You'd feel like saying 'gracias' if, like Roman Camargo in 1917, you'd survived both the hangman's noose and the firing squad. Invoking Saint Nicholas, Camargo's mother was so indebted that she commissioned a painting in gratitude. It is one of the more outlandish examples in a show of Mexican votive paintings that give thanks for, among other things, tumours vanished, sanity restored and cattle returned. Many of the paintings – each panel depicts an incident, the saint(s) to which it is dedicated and an inscription, translated into English in the caption – seem straightforward enough in their motivation. Some are bizarre, like the 'miraculous accomplishment' of 'a warehouse with multiple uses'.
Poverty and superstition, those familiar bedfellows, are in evidence in early examples. The tradition of miracle painting arose from Mexico's pre-Hispanic custom of thanksgiving and grew with the arrival of Catholicism, but it really flourished during the nineteenth-century, when even the poor could afford to commission an ex-voto on a tin roof tile. While the earliest example on show here is from the mid-eighteenth century, it's clear that the tradition is unaffected by stylistic development – flattened perspective, an economical, sometimes comically illustrative manner dominates. And while miracle paintings move with the times, hospital wards and clinical apparatus replacing bare bedrooms, the same old superstition dictates that doctors and saints share the frame.
In an adjacent gallery a wall has been festooned with tributes borrowed from the church in Guanajuato, central Mexico. There are hundreds of letters and drawings, veils and dresses, booties and bouquets. One message has been felt-tipped on to a babygrow, another graces a Styrofoam takeaway tray. Opposite this teeming edifice, Livia Radwanski's film 'Guanajuato, 2 March 2011, early morning' shows the city and its church emerging from a blue dawn light. The space between these two exhibits, between the coolness and the clamour, feels charged. You can ponder the immensity of it all or continue towards a wall of video interviews, where a woman puts her perfect tortillas down to prayer rather than practise. Bless.