Between Threads, Body, and Healing

“I try to take the private to the public, the hidden and reveal it; to carry a piece of the impossibility of matter loaded with deep energy presence that marks time. The specificity it brings from the past and the present, a testimony.”

Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín

This retrospective exhibition gathers over fifteen years of artistic production from 2005 to the present. It is structured into different themes or series that Pichillá has worked on over the years, often addressing them simultaneously.

Pichillá is a contemporary Maya Tz’utujil artist, and his art operates simultaneously within the collective and communal identity of his ancestral culture. It also exists in the realm of conceptual artistic creation, a notion that does not exist in his culture. His position as an artist emerges from the intersection of creative action and commitment within his community and culture. His art is not subscribed to the Western notion of individualism and the autonomy of art but stems from a situated dialogicity of creating works whose multiplicity is not reducible, and whose “meanings (are) loaded with deep energy presence that marks time.” This energy represents the survival and assertion of Maya culture, humanity, and spirituality through the updating of the past in the present and the future. The common thread is the materialization of the energy of the sacred.

The connection to the hidden and healing in Pichillá’s art is activated through conceptual and spiritual performativity, matter, and energy. Sometimes it manifests through the artist’s presence, as seen in “Cordón umbilical” (Umbilical Cord), 2021, “Tejer el paisaje” (Weaving the Landscape), 2020, and “Golpes y Sanación” (Strikes and Healing), 2018. However, the performative is present in the procedural materiality of his entire body of work, whether through the action of weaving a textile, burning candles, making offerings, collecting and recycling materials in the landscape, or activating existing objects in new contexts. His art aims to reveal from the body what is hidden in the impossibility of matter.

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill