Raúl de Nieves Wants You to Reimagine the Sacred
Installation view of Raùl de Nieves, In Light of Innocence, 2025. Photography by Nicolas Poblete.
“CLOSE YOUR EYES, MANIFEST THE FUTURE DREAM”
“SPIRIT SHOWS ITSELF IN THE FORM OF REFLECTIONS”
“GROWTH ARRIVES CLOAKED IN FAILURE’S GRACE”
So read three jewel-like windowpanes of Raúl de Nieves’s In Light of Innocence. I sat on the floor for over an hour in the silence of the installation, where sacred and profane, life and death, and the past, present, and future all coexist in harmony. Tailored for Pioneer Works’ main hall, the cathedral-like patchwork of late medieval culture, Mexican folk art, and queer camp aesthetics is a majestic immersive installation—although calling it that feels wrong. Partly because it is so far removed from digital technology that it makes you want to leave your phone at the door, but primarily because, like most places of worship, it functions as an affective channel, absorbing, catalyzing, and redistributing what it manifests in people. Yet while it feels sacred, it rejects worship as an act of submission. Rather, it posits that fellowship itself is sacred, such that even in my introspective soul-searching, I felt communal embrace there.
De Nieves has spent a decade developing his visual world across media. His speculative imaginary is unbound, nearly alchemical. He reworks fragments drawn from multiple histories, mythologies, religions, and (sub)cultures through the prism of his subjectivity as a gay Mexican American man. It is a disruptively hybrid, uncompromisingly queer practice. Given his infatuation with the liminal, it is suitable that most of his works are either translucent or reflective, crystalline or glittery. Light may only reveal the full scope of their rainbow beauty, like peacocks awaiting the right admirer to unveil their feathers. If every work opens a conduit into de Nieves’s queer utopian imaginary, In Light of Innocence is a multi-sensorial dive into his soul. What does it achieve? It would be tempting to suggest that it merely “queers” the cathedral to negate religious moralism and the sacred, but this work is far too reverent to justify such a cop-out.
Installation view of Raùl de Nieves, In Light of Innocence, 2025. Photography by Nicolas Poblete.
In Light of Innocence seems like de Nieves’s sincere attempt to construct his own vision of the sacred across fifty faux stained-glass panels. The lightbox mural effectively serving as a high altar is a kaleidoscopic tapestry interweaving Christian and Mesoamerican imagery of the afterlife: three heavenly gates below and a portal opening flanked by two masked figures above, both leading to abstract voids—visions of a beyond. The two rightmost panels feature living skeletons, ostensibly celebrating. The mural undergirds a set of three windows bearing the tenets of “HOPE,” “FAITH,” and “LOVE,” and a small roundlet window of a skull in the Mexican folk style. On the other hand, the thirty-two windows on the side wall of the cathedral range from figurations of chivalric archetypes and unearthly creatures to cryptic sentences and one-word statements. Symbols of death appear everywhere, in flies and skeletons, but always alongside signs of renewal. “THE FLIES WILL LAY THEIR EGGS,” as one window puts it. Christian eschatology and Mexican folklore agree: death is not an end but merely a transformation.
Installation view of Raùl de Nieves, In Light of Innocence, 2025. Photography by Nicolas Poblete.
The most peculiar memento mori is an ode to Cuban American gay conceptual artist and HIV/AIDS activist Félix González-Torres. Raised Roman Catholic, Torres often interpolated Christian liturgy to process the collective grief of the crisis. The homage is not the only allusion to HIV/AIDS haunting the cathedral. The first and last windows of the lower row of the side wall are in conversation. The first reads “SILENCE,” and the last, “DEATH,” evidently a nod to AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’s (ACT UP) protest slogan to spread awareness about HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, “SILENCE = DEATH.” There is also a window resembling the rainbow flag swarmed by four flies, as if decaying. Like his Mexican heritage, de Nieves honors his queer genealogy here, but not without a pervasive sense of loss. However, as flies remind us, death breeds life, just as collective grief is a mighty political force. In Light of Innocence wants you to recognize that force as sacred, not just by juxtaposing queer icons with religious divinities, but by unifying them throughout the space—all sacred things become part of the same constellation.
As a queer Latinx man, diving into de Nieves’s soul and letting his speculative theology unfold felt akin to a spiritual pilgrimage. I am convinced it must have felt like spiritual labor to fashion these images out of colored acetate, paper, glue, and tape, like monks who built the holiest sites out of the most common, local materials. Being there brought me solace I did not know I needed: my ego dissolved in awe; my body craved to kneel; my muscles relaxed in the embrace of kinship. My mind turned porous. Every part of myself recognized itself in flow, thinking: I am part of this constellation.
Installation view of Raùl de Nieves, In Light of Innocence, 2025. Photography by Nicolas Poblete.
I emphasize In Light of Innocence’s spiritualness not to dismiss its joyfulness. Visitors enter not with solemn reverence but with delight—with ear-to-ear smiles and an inevitable, unshakable itch to share that with other visitors by throwing non-verbal gazes that both ask and assert, “Isn’t this beautiful?” But then they usually remain silent, basking in the sacred encounter, and sit on one of the four church pews before eventually leaving. In this apocalyptic moment, simple tenets like “HOPE,” “FAITH,” and “LOVE” bring solace when exhorted with such grace and sincerity.
As I fell under the cathedral’s spell, it took me a while to notice the jeweled golden ring encrusted in a wall by the entrance, dimly lit, unadvertised, yet framed as a holy relic. As noted in the exhibition text, “the ring bears an amethyst, a diamond, two onyx stones, and a ruby—the first letters of which [(each gemstone’s name)] spell out ‘A DOOR.’” As I observed the ring in detail through the glass, I saw myself reflected in the space. I don’t think the door in question is the ring—I think it’s the reflection. If your time here is a rite of passage, the ring is there to help you realize it. I don’t think de Nieves knows where that door leads. For all the allusions to religious predestination, divination, and the inevitability of death, I don’t think he believes in destiny as something unchanging. The past, present, and future seem like interlocking, ever-shifting entities to him. That is what relics do: they carry sacred meaning across time. What lies beyond the door depends on you. “CLOSE YOUR EYES, MANIFEST THE FUTURE DREAM,” says another window.
Installation view of Raùl de Nieves, In Light of Innocence, 2025. Photography by Nicolas Poblete.
Raúl de Nieves: In Light of Innocence is on view at Pioneer Works from September 13 through December 14, 2025.
