LET IT NEVER END
Western history gradually came to call them “discoveries” as explorers widened their travels and encounters. But before stumbling upon those territories, beings, and customs that exceeded the certainties of their narrow known world, Europeans drew maps of the unknown. These unexplored zones were labeled Terra Incognita on ancient world maps, populated by threats and fabulous creatures—images created more by inspired poets of terror than by reliable information for navigators or travelers. In some maps, the cartographer heightened apprehension before those mythical lands beyond the known oceans by inscribing a phrase at the bottom of his geographic fiction, warning those who dared cross those boundaries: hic sunt dracones (here be dragons).
Perhaps a certain impulse to propose an enticing order—the need to decipher an invisible harmony that may rest upon chaos—exerts its narrative power on the canvases of the series Myth and Memory. Cecilia Paredes now creates in these imaginary cartographies a kind of poetry of the marvelous, based on compositions that combine fragments of ancient maps, engravings, illustrations from codices or books of hours, naturalistic paintings, star charts, and textile patterns. And what unfolds in these linens printed with collages of ancient memory is something like an astonishing anachronism of simultaneity. East and West fused into impossible iconographies that become sumptuous visual shocks for contemporary viewers. Symbols from the past that have already completed the journey and the encounter over a shared surface, intertwining graphic details from distant civilizations until they acquire a new, unifying symbolic possibility.
The amalgam of another’s history, written from wonder rather than fear.
Travel is a recurring theme in the work of the Peruvian artist. So is her fascination with nature’s small and perfect fabrications (multicolored feathers, shells, leaves, tiny bones), which she incorporates into her works, resignifying their metaphorical function. Her deep desire to draw close to plants and animals—to understand, if such a thing is possible, their nature—has led her in the past to mimic them through her photo-performances. Self-portraits in which she becomes invisible, in which she enters inside these natures. But these wandering stories approach in this instance perspectives that are unusual within her oeuvre.
Cecilia Paredes has disappeared in this exhibition. She had accustomed us to seeing her body and her image integrated into photographs charged with both mystery and clarity. Here, she unfolds her universe through the semantic force of the textile, the tactile, the subtleties of complex and urgent stories told without words. She says that manual work—stitch by stitch—allows her to temper her impatience, to sink more deeply into reflection.
Paredes has been incorporating this into her work for years, precisely to underscore that manual and narrative dimension, a calligraphy of personal symbols. Something that, in her case, is always framed in a contextual scope due to her explicit concern for the damage inflicted by human society on the environment. Cecilia Paredes does not portray herself in this exhibition. She thinks us.
Excerpt from a text by Fietta Jarque
Madrid, 2024