Totally different authors converge on the notion of a collective unconscious to elucidate the recurrence of symbols and archetypes throughout time and house. The work of Mexican artist Alejandro García Contreras is deeply attuned to that circulate of common consciousness shared by humanity throughout eras and geographies—a collective unconscious that, as Carl Jung described, just isn’t a static archive however a residing subject of creativeness regularly reshaping itself by way of the “authentic directions” already embedded within the human psyche.
One of the best artwork typically begins with this sort of soul name, remodeling creation right into a mission. For Contreras, that decision got here early, by way of a picture he encountered as a baby in a ebook given to him by his grandfather—a mystical man and shaman. The ebook, an encyclopedia of the occult exploring timeless questions by way of delusion and enigma, turned, because the artist describes it, “a form of information or amulet for my creativeness.” Within the chapter on Vampirism and Lycanthropy, Contreras found a terrifying but seductive picture: a harpy-like lady attacking a unadorned man. “That picture would by no means depart me,” he tells Observer. “That erotic undertone—imperceptible to me on the time—was etched into my reminiscence.”
The picture, nonetheless, bore no signature or caption. Solely years later, due to Google, did Contreras study it was a portray by Bolesław Biegas, a visionary Polish artist from the early twentieth century. His connection to Biegas deepened when, throughout an Artwork Explora residency in Paris, Contreras discovered himself—by each likelihood and intention—on the Polish Library in Paris (Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris). Strolling by way of the Biegas Museum, he skilled a profound sense of reconnection that will later encourage his newest exhibition.
Contreras spent hours within the museum that day, piquing the curiosity of the employees. After listening to his story, they launched him to Agnieszka Wiatrzyk, one of many museum’s curators. The exhibition that emerged from this encounter stands as a testomony to that journey and the religious connections it nurtured—a kind of uncommon tales that renew religion in artwork’s energy to attach the soul to one thing higher, past the confines of particular person existence.
With “The World as a Labyrinth,” soon-to-close on the Polish Library in Paris, Contreras presents his ceramic cosmologies, enigmatic bronze narratives and visionary cosmic work in a dialogue that spirals by way of the evocative connections between Bolesław Biegas and the symbolism of Gustave Moreau. Set throughout the historic Polish Library—one of many oldest and most important Polish cultural establishments exterior Poland, a trove of artifacts and archives celebrating the genius of the fin-de-siècle Polish diaspora from Biegas to Chopin—the exhibition supplies a profoundly poetic setting for Contreras’s exploration of religious lineage and common consciousness.
“These artists come from fully totally different contexts of house and time than me, however that’s precisely the place the connection occurs,” Contreras displays as he walks us by way of the present. “What I’ve been attempting to do by way of my very own apply is to discover this concept of non-time—an area the place symbols and archetypes resist chronology. It’s one thing that persists inside a form of collective imaginary, the shared language of the human soul,” he provides. “I like considering of it that means—what Jung referred to as the collective unconscious. That’s what connects us all. We’re every channeling one thing historical and shared, even when we’re doing it from totally different locations, in numerous eras, or for various causes.”
Mixing up to date popular culture with Mexican folklore, historical mythology, occultism and faith, Contreras constructs a syncretic continuum of cultures and traditions as an imaginative try to know the thriller of the universe’s origin and the soulful essence of human existence. The multilayered narratives alchemically formed inside his intricate glazed ceramics mix the wealthy symbolic heritage of his homeland with cross-cultural philosophical ideas and the Japanese pop and underground cultures of manga and anime, revealing the timelessness of themes, dramas and questions that accompany human life. His artwork turns into a residing expression of what Michael Meade describes because the mythic realm—one thing round quite than linear—a non-chronological house the place symbols are usually not relics however residing presences, continually re-entering the world by way of creativeness.
Although his artwork attracts first from his lived expertise as a deeply delicate soul navigating a terrestrial, time-bound realm, Contreras approaches his apply as each alchemist and shaman, mediating between the seen world and the unseen constructions of the spirit. His conjurations of symbolic references span your entire course of civilization, uncovering recurring psychological and narrative patterns. Historical and up to date symbols converge to disclose, throughout the dialectic of time, enduring messages and meanings that embrace the circle of life and the open, deeply rooted relationship Mexican tradition holds with life, loss of life and rebirth.
Whereas finding out Biegas’s archives, Contreras found lots of the motifs and varieties he had instinctively explored in his personal work. A vitrine displaying Biegas’s drawings of dinosaurs is paired with comparable early sketches and works by Contreras, making a play of resonances and echoes that runs all through the exhibition—a dialogue born not of imitation however of an unconscious, spontaneous connection throughout time. This mirroring extends past formal affinities to a shared cosmology, turning delusion right into a mirror for the psyche, the place divinity and want, the bodily and celestial, the person and collective coexist. The thread of visionary mystical continuity finds one other echo in Gustave Moreau, whose symbolist and allegorical compositions anticipated the magical sensuality that animates, in distinct methods, each the work of Biegas and Contreras.
Frequent amongst all three artists is a timeless fascination with the femme fatale, used right here as a cosmic precept exposing, very like the Romantics’ chic, humanity’s confrontation with its personal limits and mortality. The heroines that populate Contreras’s works stand fiercely towards subjugation to the male gaze, echoing how Biegas’s androgynous figures typically carry a predominantly masculine vitality regardless of their conventional depiction as female muses.
Drawing from the huge repertoire of manga and anime—which reinterpret historical myths and tales—Contreras revives the facility of archetypes, celebrating the deconstruction of feminine stereotypes whereas infusing them with company and want. Conscious of their seductive power, as in Biegas’s work, these heroines stand in opposition to their male counterparts—typically faceless spirits or demons who pursue, crave and rely on them for their very own pleasure, changing into ensnared by their wishes.
“What I’m attempting to do is join totally different symbolic universes,” Contreras explains, citing the instance of a satan lady conceived by a fantastic manga artist from Japan referred to as Kōna Man. “Her illustration appears to be like nearly similar to one in every of Biegas’s figures: wings sprouting from her head, a sensual, otherworldly presence,” Contreras explains. “I’ve been taking part in with these connections, linking manga—which I’ve come to grasp extra deeply after spending time in Japan—and the broader subject of latest popular culture with historical myths.” As Contreras notes, manga have change into one of the influential and revolutionary visible languages shaping our collective creativeness at the moment, sharing the identical symbolic world-building energy that historical tales, myths and oral traditions as soon as held.
On the identical time, in his portrayal of the femme fatale, Contreras deliberately reveals the vulnerability embedded in sexual intuition and its eager for stability and love. His figures typically exist throughout the pressure of unresolved emotion, an vitality that likewise pulses by way of Biegas’s work. But luminous of their esoteric cost, the works of each artists gesture towards a nonhuman, nonterrestrial rhythm—an entry level to the collective consciousness, the place pure components and creatures coexist past the confines of civilization, society and spiritual taboo.
In three-dimensional kind, Biegas’s our bodies are elongated, twisted and torqued—typically caught in uneasy postures that recommend ecstasy, struggling, or transfiguration—embodying the soul’s craving to flee the bounds of the bodily physique and resist strict categorization. Equally, Contreras’s heroines freely merge references, changing into symbolic figures that seem to belong to a different world, one guided extra by spirit than by sensory impulse.
On the coronary heart of all three artists’ work lies a meditation on the primordial power of Eros, the very important vitality from which all issues emerge and to which all issues return within the countless cycle of matter and transformation it sustains. Echoing Michael Meade, right here Eros transcends romantic love or bodily want and is expressed—by way of earthly symbology—as a cosmic present of connection, the animating vitality that binds life and fuels creation and creativeness. On this sense, Contreras, like Biegas, revives the traditional Greek conception of Eros because the precept that attracts separate entities into relation, forging unity from multiplicity: the adhesive of the cosmos, the thread binding soul to soul, human to world, delusion to that means—shifting towards wholeness, creativity and sweetness, not as sentiment however as sacred vitality.
Embracing this shared symbolic language, for Moreau in addition to for Biegas and Contreras, figuration is rarely portraiture or realism—it’s a vessel of metaphysical vitality, an incarnation of interior states, cosmic forces and psychic archetypes. For all three, artwork capabilities as revelation—a bridge between the seen and invisible realms.
Animating compositions that oscillate between concord and chaos, drawn with a line that’s without delay delicate and forceful, their figures function on each psychological and religious planes: they externalize feelings, instincts and goals—what each Biegas and Contreras describe as “the invisible lifetime of issues.”
The works of those three artists, this exhibition reveals, resonate with Jacobo Grinberg’s Syntergic Principle, which proposes that have emerges from the interplay between the energetic subject created by the mind (the neuronal subject) and the energetic construction of the universe—a liminal house the place life and destruction converge and the place the thriller of creation might be reawakened.
Biegas’s works from round 1900-1910 already envision the human kind as a microcosm of the universe: faces dissolve into stars, limbs unfurl into spirals or vegetal motifs in his Cosmic Cycle, depicting figures intertwined with planetary and astral varieties. Humanity right here is a part of a common choreography—simply as in Contreras’s work, the place texture and brushwork magmatically form symbolic visions that appear to recreate throughout the canvas the identical formative course of governing all existence: matter, atoms, energies and forces converging into new life. In each artists, the physicality of kind dissolves into the ceaseless movement of evolution and transformation, as artwork turns into a liminal threshold between matter and spirit—a portal to different extensions of the human soul.
This connects to a different recurring theme in each artists’ work: the Island of the Useless, a motif impressed by Arnold Böcklin’s Symbolist portray Die Toteninsel (Eighteen Eighties), which haunted many European artists of that period. But whereas Böcklin’s island symbolized the passage between life and loss of life—a romantic imaginative and prescient of eternity—Biegas and Contreras reinterpret it as a metaphysical panorama of transformation quite than finality, a web site of passage the place matter and spirit merge. That island, just like the art work itself, turns into a middle of consciousness, embodying the idea that human existence is cyclical—a part of a common rhythm binding life, loss of life and creation into one steady circulate.
This exhibition reveals how the symbolism of Alejandro García Contreras—like that of Moreau and Biegas—is finally a holistic, syncretic ode to our probably infinite individualities, urging us to embrace a renewed religious universality that awakens the soul to its place inside a higher cosmic complete. Their artwork turns into an exploration of the invisible territories of transformation, the place life, reminiscence, historical delusion and up to date consciousness converge to uncover luminous truths about what it means to exist, to create and to harness the facility of mythic creativeness to entry different dimensions. That mythic creativeness—the primordial act, as Mircea Eliade described it, and the world’s authentic language, in Michael Meade’s phrases—stays able to restoring coherence and that means in a fractured age.
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