Biting into a bar of soap, getting your heel stuck inside a beer can, soaking your feet in the sink while wearing red shoes. Absurd scenarios, yet not entirely unlikely—especially when you’re on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And that is exactly how the paintings signed by Mexican artist Monica Loya make us feel: disoriented, lost inside a distorted reality, restless yet also enchanted by delicate (but not too delicate) color palettes. Add to all of this a touch of overt absurdity and the picture is complete: who hasn’t ever started imagining things? Seeing double or feeling as if they were walking on clouds?

As she explains in Creative Boom, her creative process often begins with observing reality and a strong introspective component. Dreams, humour, sarcasm and a fair amount of overthinking coexist in her work. Rather than depicting everyday life as it is, Loya prefers to manipulate it, introducing unlikely details that are never completely out of place. Her subjects—often faceless—can make us feel uneasy, yet they also reflect the complexity of emotions that are difficult to navigate, using femininity as their starting point.

As mentioned earlier, Loya’s preferred palette is one of the strengths of her work. It consists of shades of pink, light blues, reds and other colors that we associate with a pop aesthetic capable of immediately capturing the viewer’s attention and sparking curiosity, encouraging them to linger and dissect every detail of the scene. In their own way, Monica Loya’s compositions also make us smile: hidden within the bizarre situations she depicts is a subtle sense of irony, almost an invitation not to take the absurdity of everyday life too seriously and to let ourselves be surprised by those small oddities that make reality just a little more surreal.