¹Luis Felipe Fabre, Flores para los muertos, “Una temporada en Mictlán”, (Nezahualcóyotl dixit ), p. 91.

Sincere thanks to Vania Macías and Julio García Murillo.

¶ Annabela Tournon Zubieta

«Cuando el resto del cuerpo se ha perdido: cuando la lengua se ha perdido: habla la mano¹.»

Omar Castillo Alfaro presents at the gallery Guadalajara 90210 a set of pieces that make up an installation immersed in red light charged with multiple resonances. Inactinic red light used to develop images on photographic paper before being fixed with acid baths; red like cinnabar, a poison used by ancient cultures, such as the Mayan, to protect the dead from the living on their journey to the afterlife.

Trained first in metallurgical chemical engineering with a specialty in mining extraction, and later in the arts at UNAM, Omar makes constant references to the physics of materials and their toxicity that are not anodyne, but are endowed with powerful material and affective metaphors. On the other hand, this exhibition is placed under original resonances, since its title in Mayan Naab Taanaj refers to a school of painters of the late classical period who signed their works with white flowers Naab, and it is also the first exhibition of the artist in his home Taanaj, in Mexico.

The exhibition articulates several typologies of materials and gestures that emerged in the course of different investigations. We find the inquiries around the flowers in the Mayan iconography that are added to the forge work that Omar performs manually and cold. From the practice of drawing-sculpture come the central supporting structure -later worked with paraffin-, the stalactite floral sculptures, and the frames composed of arabesques that echo the churrigueresque baroque bordering the engraved metal plates.This white kerosene work embodies a surface that emancipates itself from its support when the drops regain the form of a flower. They also find a counterpoint in the earthen motifs that surround the sculptures and connote another state of matter, pulling these fantasies of "saffron and moons" towards the earthy. On the other hand, the sculptural work in stone, obsidian and tezontle, two extremely significant minerals for the pre-colonial period, offers other references to the pre-Hispanic past, to the Aztec culture, with its feathered heads, macaws and other birds' beaks, which enrich the bestiary displayed here between figuration and abstraction. Finally, the engraved metal plaques continue the iconographic work on the flower, for from the form of fish and jaguars, Mayan painters abstracted floral motifs. In addition, these pieces provide another kind of light to the exhibition, a light from the other side, from the traps of faith, from the traps of sight.

The artist's iconographic and scientific research extends into material experimentation with the aim of dialoguing with crafts and manufacturing techniques that have been forgotten, repressed and undervalued since the colonial period. The starting point of this research is an exchange, at a distance, with the women of her own family, repositories of knowledge interwoven with affection. As well as with other communities of artisans who practice feather art, stone carving or wax molding, in regions such as Teotitlán del Valle. These techniques are not simply incorporated by the artist into his work, but undergo multiple variations and adaptations in the process, in the same way that each piece is worked in a singular way, creating chains of objects that exhaust forms of time, just as the historian George Kubler wanted to reorganize the history of art into a history of things.

by Annabela Tournon Zubieta

Based in France for several years and where his work has been exhibited and recognized, Omar Castillo Alfaro belongs to a generation of migrant artists in Europe, Mexicans or Latin Americans in the process of becoming, who live under the guidelines of a double culture, that is, in a double distance and proximity to their territories of origin and life; this allows them a singular reinvention of what could be called their own culture. Although the importance of the experience abroad of some artists and intellectuals for the elaboration of national cultures is well known, less emphasis is placed on the critical load of the view that these artists can offer from the outside.

Thus, in times of post-pandemic globalization, perhaps the vocation of diasporic communities is less to reaffirm a national substratum than to undermine and re-interrogate from a vulnerable exteriority that which constructs a collective but subjectively lived identity. Beyond, in today's postcolonial France, crossed by the questioning of its republicanism and its double-sided democracy, the interpellation of Omar's work about colonial pasts, about knowledge concealed by Western epistemologies, about exterminated languages and cultural practices, contributes to raise, in an original way, the importance of hybrid and impure identities to think the forms and their historical narratives, art and its languages placed under an international horizon, open to small and large differences, as well as to their possible translations.

In that sense, Omar Castillo Alfaro interrogates from his practice saturated with formal and ritual reminiscences to the history of art of the first and second modernity. The way a baroque ethos is reaffirmed and updated, as defined by the philosopher Bolívar Echeverría, interrogating the center from the abhorred margin, in a constant and dramatic overthrow. For at present, who could say who is at the periphery of whose center? It is also the sense of the number of mirrors that inhabit this exhibition, iron or obsidian mirrors, black mirrors and unfolded floral motifs that extend symmetrically in space behind the metal and spiral forms. The mirror as a metaphor for the idea of coloniality/modernity, the plane of contact, the dark side of the lights, the geocentric and historical turn, the constantly unfolded point of view of those who walk from one coast to the other.