HEAVENLY METRICS

Today, we realize that the art of accuracy and the accuracy of art, consubstantial and indivisible amongst each other, dip their precise challenges into a horizon that is light years away in time, but vastly closer to us than the magnificent, overused and always surprising golden ratio.

It is this finding, the Chacana – a key – that allows us to attempt a possible and plausible interpretation of this modular, geometric and accurate exhibition.

We find this trace in a fleeting but definite appearance, in a low but dense percentage of the work on display, where we can see an intentional deconstruction of the so-called Andean Cross, the central and oldest symbol in Mesoamerican culture.

This figure of undeniable perfect measurements, which appears in the Chavin reliefs, as in the Wari tunics, the Nazca ceramics or the embroideries and trails of mysteriously ancient sites like Tiwanaku, gives us the clue to an accuracy that we will see repeated with obsessive insistence throughout all the works exhibited, with the exception of one piece we believe seeks to take us out of context in order to highlight fittings and adjustments, the mobile, cosmic and spatial proportions present in MÉTRICA.

The Chacana is an instrument, a tool in the style of a ruler or a celestial compass that binds man to the cosmos, the omnipresent Square Cross is clearly related to the cult of the Southern Cross and the Fish, which constitute the Andean interpretation of the Chameleon Constellation, those eternal cosmic references that shine and will continue to twinkle above us for ever and ever.

Thus, through proportions with no margin of error, we may well hypothesize for this exhibition the presence of an attempted match between the observer and a transcendent and sidereal reality, common to the traditional formulas of sacred- magical geometry, revisited and revitalized and perhaps even parodied, in its most essential and intimate elements.

Scrutinizing once again this hypothesis of a revisited antiquity, we surprisingly find an axis piece, also modular and transformable at will: a totem, configured in this context as an Axis Mundi or “axis of the world”, a universal and ubiquitous symbol and a vital ornament in many ancient cultures around the globe, expressing a connection between heaven and earth. It is the middle of everything and the mark that allows for the material and spiritual interchange between the upper realms and the lower areas inhabited by man. Found in distant regions of the world and adopting the most diverse and fanciful shapes, Axis Mundi is always an androgynous being, both male and female: tower, staircase, smoke column, mountain, tree or sacred figure created for this purpose. For the mythologist Mircea Eliade, “all microcosm, every inhabited region, has a center, i.e., a place that is sacred above all.”

There is therefore, subsumed in this “world of perfect measurements”, of “the exact metrics” in MÉTRICA, two telltale clues linked to the search for unity between the observer and the Whole. A Whole that is harmony and perpetual change, and where millimeters and even forms invisible to the naked eye play, as they have always had since the dawn of time, an unavoidable role.

Yael Rosenblut

April 2016