no tenemos caballos para cruzar este caudal
Solo Exhibition by Mariana Paniagua, curated by Bruno Enciso – PEANA
We watch the trees violently sway amidst the rain, which has been pouring down mercilessly for hours. Every drop is an icy meteor, remnant of a bad omen. From the memory of past storms, times when our eyes were new, we try to recapture a sense of familiarity—a known color, one that will steady us. That's not enough. Moving to another place isn’t an option either. This valley imprisons us with its magnificence. In a few hours, its edges will have collapsed, and we’ll have to redraw them whenever we’ve recovered our strength.
As never before, a series of doubts, anxieties, and distressing forebodings send tremors through the porous membrane of those bodies traversed by landscape. As in remote times, it is unclear what kind of agency we possess as living beings in relation to the forces that shape many of our horizons of possibility. Do we even recognize their nature? Political conflicts and environmental alerts —even if each one has specific frameworks and issues— blur the boundaries between them, competing for the prominence amid the emergencies, now integrated into the hyper-informed panorama of everyday life. Scales have also been disrupted, and with them, our confidence on discerning the right paths to take.
Given that contemporary painting has identified the deceitful relationship between gaze and dominance —a central axis in the genealogy of landscape as a pictorial genre— new questions continue to arise about how to address this issue. These questions do not always emerge as brilliant insights; they’re also nagging itches. What’s the form of these overwhelming, simultaneous forces that affect perception? How many of these vivid anomalies are we capable of enduring? The idea of witnessing an omen, whatever it may be, no longer responds solely to the need of projecting an exception within specific regimes, but to the longing to re-couple body and event, even if this operation takes place in the midst of crisis. It’s not about replacing a rational-modern perspective with a devotional-religious one, although it does acknowledge that the equivalence between observation and meaning has torn, or at least, eroded.
This exhibition continues the intensive inquiries into the metabolic forces of landscape that Mariana Paniagua has been pursuing for several years now. While she persists in her intention to address the multiplicities from whose interaction space is born, on this occasion she opens a riskier turn, setting in motion new ways of producing pictorial surfaces where catastrophes are unveiled and wounds are made present without healing. Not everything takes place on the canvas, because the illusion of its pure availability has also been subverted. In a ceaseless and delicate transformation of her own relationship with painting, the artist insists on hybrid and experimental methodologies that magnetize the visible results on the pieces to dozens of sketches in which drawing, painting, and poetry values are indistinguishable.
Our examination of The Book of Miracles (also known as Augsburg Book of Miracles) provided us with some cues on how can a landscape convey an omen. It is a compilation of medieval illustrations and paintings that arguably dates from the period between 1545 and 1552. Since its sudden discovery in 2008, its unusual repertoire of scenes has caused a stir among historians and Renaissance specialists, who continue to trace its origins and proposing frameworks for its interpretation. Some perspectives suggest that it is a kind of illustrated speculation on the fears of the time, while others suggest that it is a realistic record of events that actually occurred, to which divine explanations were attributed—which would justify its visual rhetoric. In relation to this range of interpretations of the book’s images, Paniagua Cortés proposes a perspective that brings it into the present through a formal shift in each of the series in the exhibition.
First, large-format paintings depict staggering meteorological events unfolding over specific ecosystems. The densities of matter melt or mineralize, reacting to the imminent collision of forces greater than themselves. The vague sensation of witnessing an instant dissolves into the times of eruption, collapse, and yet another time—a thousand-year-old one, far more elusive, yet devastating. Discreet seams on the canvas surface, acting like miraculous boundaries, introduce new ways of organizing the pictorial information. Lines whose reticular power falters in response of the clamour of catastrophe and the effects of the risks taken. Then there’s the cut: the absent horizon, in its unattainable outline, becomes more complex upon discovering that everything in sight seems sliced by a sagittal cut. What do we manage to see there, among the strata of the violated flesh-world?
Although scaled down to more restrained intensities, similar operations reappear in the smaller works. In these unique, bodily forms, crafted from layered fabrics, we now find not only seams but also hardened surfaces that provide its own support. Their versatility as a base, background, edge, and frame— all athe same time— lends them a gentle vitality, which seems to make the anomalous landscape that runs through them a little more livable. Like small narrative niches, the possibility of enunciating the symbolic value of catastrophe becomes viable again.
Suspended at the gallery’s entrance hall, we find a single work on paper that serves the dual purpose of both opening and closing the exhibition. Collage’s own matter essays a fragmented sensibility —equally exhausted and alert, weighted by the present moment— whose derived gestures fuse lucidity and caution. During one of the studio visits leading up to this exhibition, that same contradictory sensibility, so characteristic of Mariana’s painting, served as inspiration for a collaborative poem we wrote while discussing an anonymous painting in which a sovereign and his court are crossing a river on horseback in the midst of a deluge. We wrote:
we don't have any horses to cross this river flow
we don't have any
we drowned them
because they were starving to death.
Bruno Enciso
