La limpia transforms the popular ritual of the egg cleansing (limpia de huevo) into a near-mythological scene, sacralizing a folk ritual while resisting moral binaries of good and evil. The ritual unfolds as follows: one person begins by rubbing an egg over the body of another, to absorb any bad energy. They then crack the egg into a glass of water, where the shapes formed by the whites become a map of the ailment that haunts the receiver. Once the egg is opened, sickness is both revealed and released, diagnosed and cured in a single gesture. Vargas Bravo’s depiction complicates this logic. The glass has a straw, and from the mouth of the fainted figure, yolk spills out. The female subject is ingesting or re-ingesting the very thing that the others attempt to cleanse her from, proposing the question, ‘what happens when the desire to heal encounters a vicious cycle?’ The artist’s version of this ritual introduces a suspended, almost sacred dimension. La grieta appears in the ground, in the egg, and possibly in the subject herself. Is this an illness? An ecstasy? A revelation?

Berenice Vargas Bravo sees her paintings as activations of protest and rebellion. She reflects, “Like the ahuehuetes overtaking an ordered and invasive urban infrastructure, I like to think that our collective cry can crack cement.”