Affectivities, Mushrooms and Planets

Artistic pratices that locate stars. An approach to the artistic work of Juan Carlos León

Yayo Herrero says that we are living in a moment of crisis of civilization.^[1] We could say that hegemonic culture, the economy, and politics have declared war on life. At the origin of this crisis is the rupture of Western culture and modernity with respect to the materiality of the Earth and bodies. Deconstructing the myths and beliefs that support an ecocidal, patriarchal, colonial, and unjust culture is a preliminary step to reorienting subjectivities and practices that place life, vulnerable and finite, as a priority.

We are currently living in a time of death. Are rituals and spiritualities tools to sustain us in moments when life is at risk? What feelings matter in public life? What happens to mourning that is prevented, made impossible, taken away, denied, and deferred? How can we rework this space of mourning, no longer as an individual, but as a public manifestation of affection from individuality, and reinscribe it in the space of the artistic and the public? Is it easier to understand and inhabit a time of death, of mourning, with the support of magical-artistic-scientific practices? How can we inhabit a space of mourning through self-care and mutual care?

Science, art, and magic are complementary ways of exploring the world. Artists make different kinds of interpretations of nature. Magic, science, and art are forms of creative resistance, a way of understanding the universe and navigating it, a deeply relational way of being and collaborating with human, non-human, and extra-dimensional entities, and even machines and technologies. In the face of this reality, artistic practices can exercise a renewed function as spaces of magical-scientific knowledge, as spaces of discursive negotiation in terms not only of representation. And at the same time, they are practices that can bring us closer to spirituality and give place to care, memory, and affection. How can we understand this complex relationship between science, art, and magic? What form does the creation of images and materialities take in the interstices of these practices?

Juan Carlos León is an Ecuadorian artist currently living in Mexico whose work is characterized by a hybrid identity. His production unites past, present, and future, embracing culture and nature, art and science. He often works with materials rich in physical and symbolic qualities (oil, water, fungi, medicinal plant extracts, etc.), which also emanate economic, religious, mythological, and cultural connotations. He is interested in the way technological advancement gives humans the illusion of power over nature. He is now experimenting with a variety of collaborations between the human element and the natural element by designing a controlled human environment that eventually gives way to an organic process. He produced a series of works, in which he placed spores of the fungi Penicillium and Rhizopus and yeasts on petri dishes. With the control of humidity, temperature, and light, the mold begins to grow. Once the fungus integrates with the paper and information, it continues to grow. After a few weeks, the mold takes on abstract shapes and creates its own living information display.

Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that art is halfway between scientific knowledge and magical thinking.^[2] During the last two years, the world changed, and so did Juan Carlos’ artistic practice, which was affected by the losses, grief, and changes happening around his life. Juan Carlos’ mother passed away in 2020, and this event is an emotional, psychological, conceptual, and symbolic instance for the development of a different body of work (and a different way of inhabiting and being in the world). In addition to mourning the death of his mother, the artist faced a sentimental separation from his partner at the time, and the instability of not having a fixed place to live (since 2019 he constantly travels between Ecuador and Mexico for work and because he was part of the SOMA Educational Program). All these circumstances run through the processes by which León carries out his artistic work, a practice that was driven by the search for a methodology, related to a scientific language, of measurements, of data; it is transformed, or makes a transition towards intimate forms of reflection on the astral bodies, an inner/collective world that has an urgency to be represented. These are artistic exercises that have a relationship with scientific knowledge and astronomy, but that are crossed by magic, faith, and astrology.

Dispensing with simple narratives of inhabitation, Juan Carlos brings us closer to the intricate ways in which, to some extent, we have always been captivated by the allure of the numinous and the precision of the scientific. He demonstrates how magical culture’s tendencies toward secrecy, occlusion, and ciphering can provide contemporary artists with strategies of restorative communality, a renewed faith in the invocative power of personal testimony, and a poetics of practice that might boldly question our political circumstances, from the crisis of climate collapse to the constraints of socially sanctioned techniques of human care.

Juan Carlos describes his perspective on grief as a transformation, a journey:

“It is my response to this time of change and death.”^[3] It is a different look and it is full of suspicion, will and desire.

It is a furtive, shrewd, critical, melancholic, and yet eager way of looking at things, a perspective of the strange, of a time that is described as floating according to the artist, who is aware that mourning is linked to ritual and to the transformation of our symbolic universe. Everything is reconfigured according to that loss, according to the many losses that we will have to endure during life, but especially in these times of death, where “loss” is accelerated and enhanced. And to sustain us during these losses that have no remedy for scientific knowledge, it is perhaps appropriate to seek a remedy in the spiritual, in the magical.

The stars that become supernovae are responsible for creating many elements that we find in nature, including some components of the human body; we are stardust, said Sagan. In tarot, the star symbolizes resurrection, as it represents the passage from day to night, and vice versa. It also refers to a transition from a period of afflictions to a period of inner and outer peace, of spirituality. The light installation called Kuyllur o Astro brillante [Kuyllur or Bright Star is the result of a mathematical operation in which the artist creates a formula with the duration of the last phone call he received from his mother and the coordinates of the place of his mother’s death. The result of this mathematical operation is the place of projection and angled field of vision that points to the spatial site where his mother transforms into a new star in the sky. This piece was accompanied by a video that shows fictitious galaxies and luminous stars, created from the technological manipulation of the online video transmission of the moment prior to her burial.

In the series of paintings Kallumpakunamikan shunku [Colonizing the End] the artist is interested in the infinite ways in which materials such as Penicillium mold fungi, iodine, and gentian violet can be applied to develop abstract and colorful compositions on canvas-containers modified as if they were petri dishes that visualize information from unsent or unreceived emails, comments on social networks, or handwritten notes that reflect Juan Carlos’ relationship with his mother prior to her death; an almost mystical devotion to the act of making and the desire to communicate through symbols and nuances.^[4] All living things exist in symbiosis with fungi and this intertwining of multiple species is the basis of all ecosystems. This raises big questions about where life begins and ends and offers incredible new possibilities for how we might think about the future of our existence.

Efemérides entre Pandora y Patricia [Ephemeris Between Pandora and Patricia] is one of his most recent works presented in the exhibition Estertor at Oficina Particular gallery, for which he creates a series of unstable inks on paper which make reference to the temporal relationship between memories about the artist’s mother’s trip to Mexico and moments of astronomical relevance that occurred in 1980. They are pieces that work with the idea of death, mourning, and presence from an astronomical, spatial gaze, dismantling the Christian idea of heaven and the celestial. They are pictorial exercises that fade due to their material condition (unstable dye) and will only keep the record of the story or the feeling narrated through phrases and the color pantones used; while influences  of the formative impact of spirituality, sacred geometry, color theory, and scientific thought can be seen. Juan Carlos uses iodine and gentian violet as materialities to heal wounds, but also for their color quality, a very intense fluorescent orange and violet which undoubtedly transform and enter into our gaze, providing another different image of death, an image that tells us that the fading of life is part of the permanence of a body, of the continuity of a cycle. Visually, the ink series also makes reference to the graphics used in posters related to science fiction content of the seventies and eighties, but also confronts the idea of an enduring pictorial practice that seeks to be eternal and immutable.

In Extracción [Extraction] (2022), the artist reproduces the morphology of a planet that is made of copal; from the copal tree spills an aromatic resin of cultural, economic, social, and mystical importance. People commonly use copal to burn and offer to the deceased. Also, its boiled bark is drunk as water to treat internal injuries, as well as to soothe the bronchial tubes, and to cleanse the body and space to change their energy. In this copal planet is embedded a gold pebble, which is the product of melting down the artist’s wedding ring. This stone, an asteroid, is a golden celestial body that crashed into the copal planet, one materiality that crashes into another, and in its collision an amulet is produced, an esoteric object that can be treated as a fetishistic-ritual element that represents a certain emotional moment for the artist.

The materialities used by Juan Carlos in his works place us in front of a different relationship with time, reminding us of the fragility of the body, disease, but also the ability to heal.

Juan Carlos’ is a challenging project: to think and act from the perspective of stars, satellites, the universe, fungi, death; to try to speak, not from human to human, but from constellation to constellation, from planet to planet.

From mushroom to star. The questions that emerge from these works seem to capture that moment in history when the very survival of the species is threatened, but they also summarize many other questions that permeate the sciences, arts, and myths of our time. How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life and death? What are our responsibilities to the planet, other people, and other forms of life? How do we think about death and its images? And what would life be like without stars?

As capitalism becomes increasingly alien and inaccessible in its workings and increasingly impervious to political change, people are turning to spiritual inner worlds and mystical outer worlds. While much of the new magical thinking returns to the old countercultural aspiration of “expanded consciousness” and a psychedelic oneness with the world, it is really a “regression of consciousness,” a refusal to face reality as it is, a retreat from trying to make sense of it and act to change it. “Magical-scientific” thinking is a projection of wish fulfillment into a reality from which we prefer to withdraw, one in which the problems and contradictions of the modern world are healed by merging the imaginary and the real: the “subjectification of all meaning.” Art has always walked the line between the real and the imaginary, but in the contemporary return of the magical, the spiritual is the world we prefer to live in. You may not really believe in magic, yet everyone prefers not to break the spell. Life is finite.