Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños,
Oaxaca City, Mexico
18th September / 30th October 2009
Symbolic Battles
In 2004, a Jaguar appeared in Cristo Rey La Selva, a lost mountain village of Oaxaca. The news of its apparition was almost like a story or the return of an indigenous myth to our current reality. The wild animal divided the community because it had eaten various cows and sheep. The young men wanted to kill it, while the elders assured them that to kill the Jaguar would be an affront to the gods and the ancestors, as in their founding myth they came from a mythical jaguar who had shown the limits of the town’s territory. However, the feline kept eating the livestock, which meant that the argument was won by the young; they didn’t care about the reasons put forward by the elders: ‘We weren’t livestock farmers, the cows and sheep came recently through government programs. We are the ones who have taken apart the jungle and entered the jaguars’ territory to raise livestock. We are a people who for centuries have lived with the jungle and from the jungle’. The youth forgot these reasons and their origin myths as descendants of a jaguar and hired a tiger hunter to hunt the spotted intruder.
The tough hunter from the neighboring community wore jaguar teeth on his necklace and amulets as a symbol of all of his hunting exploits. On this occasion the hunter failed, he returned frightened from where he had set a trap with a dead calf for the Jaguar. His tale was amazing: ‘we climbed a big tree at the foot of which we placed the dead calf. We had the foot of the animal tied to a cord, which in turn was tied to my arm. My companion and I settled in with rifles and lanterns upon two big branches as we got ready to wait. When we heard noises and felt the first pull on the dead animal we looked down, it was late and we had fallen asleep, but we saw in place of the Jaguar an intense shining light. We thought that the day must have dawned, but it was only three or four in the morning. It was the Jaguar that shone and when we tried to shoot he went into the mountains like the sun running through the forest.
The hunter’s failure became that of ledged and the story added to the Jaguar’s myth. The Jaguar continued to devour livestock and so the community thought of a way to catch it alive. They placed a trap in a cave and managed to shut the animal in. Later they asked their friends to help them organize the freeing of their god in a more remote part of the jungle.
Both Fernando Aceves and I found ourselves involved in this story. I remember that he produced a fantastic painting for auction to raise funds to develop alternative incomes for communities, encouraging them to stop farming livestock, which was putting them in conflict with the Jaguar and destroying the jungle. The precious jaguar was like a roar of warning that seemed to be saying: ‘You are entering one of the last spots of biodiversity that are left in the country; while I exist it means the ecosystem is still healthy. When you start to enter my territory, we will be wiped out, we the great felines and after us, all of the diverse flora and fauna with which we share territory’.
I write this from the largest and most heavily populated city on the American continent. I think of the paintings that José María Velasco painted in the XIX century of the valley, now houseing this urban monster. Nothing remains of those landscapes. Only a painting heritage that has been transmitted to the hands of two or thee painters of my generation, without doubt one of which is Fernando Aceves Humana. Yesterday, getting on the metro, I thought about that painting of monkeys running along a pipeline at sunset. Through the window of the metro I saw a City Government sign saying: ‘In 2010 water could run out’. I closed my eyes and I felt very clearly the message of Aceves’ prodigious painting: we are joining the species in extinction, we are finishing off the petroleum and for the petroleum and with the petroleum we are finishing with the planet and have destroyed the peace between nations hundreds of times. We are also running out of the steel with which they make the pipelines and much worse, we are running out of drinking water.
The paintings of Aceves Humana, painted with a firm brushstroke full of energy, that in many of the pieces turns furious, are more than an ecological denunciation, they are our mirror. While these simian paintings were being created in Fernando’s Oaxacan studio in 2006, outside, on the streets great battles were taking place between the popular movement APPO and the government federal forces in Oaxaca. During this period, Aceves shut himself away in the private cabinets of the Natural History Museum of Paris to draw and paint species that are extinct or at risk of disappearing, at night the Parisian suburbs turned into bonfires of cars burnt by a youth without a future living in the immigrant neighborhoods. As the series was completed, the international finance system collapsed and with that millions of people joined the numbers of those who are dying of hunger. This is the real crisis. Those millions of people aren’t going to survive because the figures have stabilized in the stock exchange and the rivers won’t be filled with United States Treasury bonds, nor will many of the species that we see today, painted raw in urban contexts by Fernando’s brush, walk again on earth, not even on an earth covered in asphalt. What is left? Would we to go back to mystifying the animals? Go back to making us sacred to respect the last specimens that exist and understand that to save them is to save ourselves? At least I have the hope that the painters who say something with their art, something that is worth seeing and listening to deep down, aren’t a species on the edge of extinction and are going to start to say the things that we need to understand. Like the great crisis of the 30’s in the last century, there was a creative effervescence, which acted as a strong contrast against the wars, the economic depression and all of the calamities caused by the capitalist games of that moment.
It seems that all of the years spent working in diverse aspects of painting and graphics by Fernando, all of these explorations of rendering light and shade, this obsessive insistence in drawing that I have known since we were adolescents and I saw him in class drawing the history or math’s teacher under the pale electric light. Drawing the benches, the girls he liked, his own hand. It would seem that his constant countryside visits in order to paint the natural landscape, or an Asian temple lost in the jungle and the valleys seen from the hills, were all training for him to come and create a series of work that has nothing to do with the market, which now dominates and regulates art. It’s about paintings that are almost unsalable, paintings for those who understand painting, for those who know what Bacon meant or the black paintings of Goya, so we all get see them. Works in which the creator thinks about the necessity to tell us something that transcends a purely poetic discourse, to talk clearly about what is happening to us as a species, as historic beings, and the artist perceives that it is the moment to alert us and to alert us there is nothing like painting well, better than ever, so that the terrible denouncement will inevitably be understood.
A great pre-Hispanic monolith has appeared underground in the historic centre of Mexico City and halted the construction of a contemporary building that was going to be erected just in front of the ‘Templo Mayor’. Fernando has been to the site to paint the Aztec offerings as they appeared. The cultural realities and animals that have been exterminated, nevertheless continue acting, sending their signals, their metaphors, beyond what we can rationally understand, symbolic battles that are the basis of this series of paintings regarding our crisis.
Fernando Gálvez de Aguinaga
Translated by Layla Meerloo