Notas desde el subsuelo (Notes from the Underground)

Ríos a través de cuevas (Rivers through Caves) marks the journey undertaken by the series of paintings presented as the first chapter of the exhibition. A trunk whose roots transform into water snakes as they slide and penetrate into the earth serves as the vertical axis connecting the jungle—lush trees and vines revealing a lush and fertile environment—with the interior landscape of the region, immersing us in the cavernous underground. By using a darker palette than in previous series, the stuccoed canvases evoke the sensation of entering a cave, suggesting the feelings of confinement and openness that occur in this environment. The sinuous figures traced on their surfaces ac- count for a reality charged with sensuality: these cavities are a womb that sustains, through reproduction itself, the existence of the cosmos. Within Maya culture, the cave was a ritual site where the cycle of life, death, and regeneration was gestated, and the animals that inhabited it were sacred: they participate in the space that was, at the same time, the mysterious and magical source of pleasure and life.

The second chapter of the exhibition (on view from May 10, 2024) will introduce a series of ceramic sculptures with black slip. In them, twists, branches, and hybridizations occur—a flower-serpent, a snail-flower, a snake-vine—where the organic merges with the formal. At the same time, these volumes stage in the gallery the porous interior landscape of the caves, with structures falling from the top, emerging from the surface, or joining both parts (stalactites, stalagmites, and flow- stone columns, respectively), personifying—with some ambiguity or freedom—animals or beings from Maya mythology. The immersive sensation is heightened with shapes that appeal to senses other than sight: at times, their sinuous modeling awakens the sound of a snake delicately sliding to the ground, descending with sensual and undulating movements along the bark of a tree.*

As a title, Notes from the Underground nods to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel of the same name, where the main character enunciates, erratically and introspectively, a monologue about inhabiting the metaphorical underground of society: a space where multiple deprivations have made him experience isolation, alienation, and profound existential anguish. I believe the underground evoked by Lorena Ancona is closer to Being and Nothingness, another existentialist work, in which Jean-Paul Sartre defines viscosity as something that blurs the boundaries between a body and the matter it interacts with, an interstitial state between liquid and solid that, due to its sticky or cohesive characteristic, generates a tangled or entangled situation. Although its connotation is negative, the viscosity of this underground reaffirms, on the contrary, ways to relate to a landscape or a place and find the stories hidden in it.

Text by Fabiola Iza