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Ruta mística

This group show, organized by the Monterrey Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Gonzalo Ortega, offers a reconsideration of the concept of mysticism within the current Latin American context through the work of ten artists who reflect on the postcolonial cultural model in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, installation and video.

The show includes works by Alfadir Luna, Antonio Paucar, David Gremard Romero, Gabriel de la Mora, Gabriel Rossell Santillán, Marcos Castro, María García-Ibáñez, Miler Lagos, Pedro Reyes and Santiago Borja. In their pursuit of new and convincing ideological models, these artists integrate ancestral and new elements in order to construct their own identities and channels for communication with the transcendental. The works are mostly conceptual in nature, and result from each artist’s process of investigation and information gathering.

David Gremard Romero and Gabriel Rossel Santillán’s particular interests have led them to explore characteristic features of indigenous religions. In Tonalamatl Ollin (2012), David Gremard focuses on Aztec symbols and world view, while Gabriel Rossell’s investigation has given him a close-up view of Huichol culture, resulting in the pieces The Burned Man (2013) and The First Man / Watakame (Archive of the Dahlem Ethnological Museum, 2006).

Santiago Borja’s work SELF/Jungcatcher (2013) banalizes and questions the spiritual value of ritual objects such as dreamcatchers, which have become so ubiquitous that they have lost their symbolic power. Marcos Castro reflects on the Mexican foundational myth and makes the figure of the eagle devouring the serpent the focal point of his work, as seen in his Talavera ceramic work, Dissolve and Coagulate (2012), and his 2007 installation Untitled (Eagle).

In his video Born Before… (urban intervention, Cali, 2009), Miler Lagos documents the current situation of the ceiba tree in his native Colombia; this tree which is sacred among pre-Hispanic cultures possesses an undeniable mystic relevance. Antonio Paucar erects an altar with his own hands in his video Altar (2006), where the flames from his fingers represent something intangible and magical.

Alfadir Luna creates a myth around a fictitious persona in his project of social insertion entitled Procession of the Lord of Corn (Procession to Unify a Man of Corn) (2011), involving the vendors and shoppers at La Merced market in Mexico City. For his part, Pedro Reyes took his inspiration from the Italian Renaissance thinker Pico della Mirandola to create a massive stone monolith into which small eyes, hairs, noses and mouths may be inserted.

The works of Gabriel de la Mora and María García-Ibáñez invoke the concept of death. In his piece Memoir I 24.10.07(2007), De la Mora recreates a family gathering with a baroque style that verges on tenebrism, while García-Ibáñez refers to the worship of bones in precisely modeled ceramic pieces decorated with drawings that fuse human and mystic elements, as seen in Bones/Stones/Flowers (2011) and Immobiles (n/d). 

Gonzalo Alberto Ortega Ugarte l Curator