This exhibition revolves around feminine beauty, a force of infinite powers that acts on both the carnal and the psychological plane, generating passion. Beautiful women experience splendor in their youth and then inevitable decline. The attempt to preserve that splendor is a human longing that the sculptor Maquiamelo has resolved by creating portraits that turn out to be striking replicas of the famous shrunken heads of the Jivaro people of Ecuador, called tzantzas in the native language.
This exhibition revolves around feminine beauty, a force of infinite powers that acts on both the carnal and the psychological plane, generating passion. Beautiful women experience splendor in their youth and then inevitable decline. The attempt to preserve that splendor is a human longing that the sculptor Maquiamelo has resolved by creating portraits that turn out to be striking replicas of the famous shrunken heads of the Jivaro people of Ecuador, called tzantzas in the native language.
The tzantzas are ritual trophies that the Indigenous people wore on special occasions as a sign of individual power. According to the anthropologists who have studied the subject, the mouths of the tzantzas were sewn shut to retain and preserve the spirit of the deceased. Maquiamelo is a portraitist devoted to encapsulating, in his representations, the talent of some of Hollywood's most beautiful divas. Thanks to his creative imagination, the artistic relevance of these actresses is heightened and becomes an unforgettable fetish. Because once your eyes have caressed even a single one of these portraits, you will never be able to forget its pleasing fascination, as happens with Andy Warhol, much less its unsettling presence, the achievement of Ron Mueck.
Maquiamelo is not a traditional portraitist. He has linked the likeness and beauty of femalefaces we all know to a ritual practice that horrifies. At the same time, he lends each portrayed woman a supernatural significance that unsettles, intrigues and, ultimately, convinces. The portraits of Audrey Hepburn, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Katherine Hepburn, Liz Taylor, Maria Félix and Marilyn Monroepass through his hands and emerge transformed into precious trophies. These are small-scale sculptures that, thanks to the symbolic projection derived from the original tzantzas, convey the noble idea that the spirit of each diva will remain with us forever. We are once again before a contemporary practice derived from the magical thinking of our most distant ancestors, expanding on what was already done by Picasso, Nolde, Brancusi, Pollock and so many others.
The show will be open to the public from March 28 to April 26, 2015.
Álvaro Medina
Art Historian and Critic