Mexican skull by Perla Arroyo. Seductive emblem
7 de March de 2022

 

Death is democratic, since, at the end of the day, whether black, brown, rich or poor, all people end up being skulls.

José Guadalupe Posada.

Text by: Luis Ignacio Sáinz

Perla Arroyo invites us to her Mexican Skull without adjectives, renounces the grandiloquence of its appearance to anchor in its original meaning and mystery. To rescue its objectual quality, sensitive but reflexive, and above all aesthetic. It transcends the banality that has made the skull a puerile symbol, devoid of full content. In the case of this creator, it is about showing and enhancing an emblem or icon (εικόνισμ, image): sum of figure and concept, which performs as a sign (union of signifier and signified).

Calavera is a masculine noun from the Latin calvarĭa, meaning skull. In addition calvarium (place of skulls) will designate a deposit of bones, ossuary, or place of penalties. Miscellaneous articulated head bones, flayed, that respond just to the voice calavera (testa or helmet). And yet its strength is preponderantly feminine.

Arroyo distrusts appearances, he insists on searching for the underlying structures. He belittles or disdains epithelial beauty, that shell that, by containing and covering us, also deceives and stuns us, since it offers us a frivolous vision of our animated being. Against the current, in order to find the primordial solidity, the ability to designate, invent and analyze the environment and its components, he identifies the bone tissue that contains our most precious jewel, the brain, and crowns it with a headdress made up of a miscellany of species: butterfly (pāpalōtl), flower (xōchitl), frog (cueyatl) and hummingbird (huitzilin). Dual elements of life-death, gender, nexus of the sacred and the profane, transit from the earthly to the cosmic and back to fulfill the complete journey of life. weltanschauung (which I understand more as “intuition of the world” than as “cosmovision”) Mesoamerican: the continuity without rupture of poles that are never opposites, but phases of the process of being and its manifestations that involve different layers of meaning: intellectual, emotional and moral (Wilhelm Dilthey: Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, 1914).

Such a parade of life prowls through the bald head, plundered of its layers and integuments that usually protect it and endow it with a unique personality. Synonyms of harmony and beauty that equally resonate with the goodness attributed by the indigenous cosmogony to this metaphor of life beyond life(tzontecomatl, skull; cuaitl, head), its course in the pilgrimage in the underworld (Mictlán). Arroyo’s skull keeps a certain hieratism, a sacred and immobile something that summons us to unravel its enigmas and secrets.

However, its representation keeps a certain distance from the “skeletal” popularity that we owe to Manuel Manilla(Calavera tapatía; flyleaf from the workshop of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo; 1890) and that José Guadalupe Posada would exalt to the point of delirium (Remate de calaveras alegres; flyleaf from the workshop of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo; 1913).

Although its universal fame is due to Diego Rivera, who definitively baptized it as The Catrina and will make it the center of the A dream of a Sunday afternoon in the central Alameda (1947), a mural in which the artist from Guanajuato collaborated with Rina Lazo, where “la huesuda” appears for the first time in full body, dressed, covered with a feather stole and flanked by the artist as a child, embraced by Frida Kahlo, and the engraver from Aquicalid. Letter of naturalization for the good death that in this its presentation in society is accompanied by more than one hundred characters of national history in an eccentric hodgepodge, among them and located towards the extremes, Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz, while posing seriously Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the emperor Maximilian, the apostle of democracy Francisco I. Madero and Hernán Cortés, or the embrace of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and José Martí.

Thus, Perla Arroyo’s three-dimensional representation draws on other transatlantic sources: the subgenre of the Vanĭtas (from the Latin, vanus(empty), belonging to the geography of still life, as a sobering memory of the ephemerality of power, wealth and beauty, very visible in the art of the Baroque, emerging in Flanders and the northern provinces, now Holland, and then settling in its own right throughout Europe. Designation originally rooted in Ecclesiastes (Eccl. 1, 2): Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”. A senequist sentence that underlines the insignificance and futility of existence. Further on in the same biblical text (9: 10) it is stated: “…for in the grave, where thou goest, there is neither work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom”.

No fuss, Mexican skull It manifests an air of seriousness and transcendence, it is not intended to be playful or circumstantial, but rather an announcement of an intangible, philosophical, spiritual vitalism in the broad sense (alluding to the immaterial dimension, endowed with intelligence and reason, sensitive, meditative experience, far from the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil). Calavera Mexicana acts as a guide on a journey into the depths, beyond the obvious, anchoring in the bone of our most resting and nourishing convictions.

Life-death, appearances are deceptive, they are nothing more than shells. The gratifying joys that lead the soul astray and confuse the spirit are the enemies to be defeated in the moralizing lessons of a plastic genre, the vanitas, linked to the baroque as a counterweight to its theatricality and excess, the stigma of vertigo that annuls reflection. In the face of the dominant sensuality that finds its champion in concupiscence, the warnings of the ephemeral, those announcements of ruin and decay, reach a not inconsiderable dose of macabre obscenity, the gratification of pain and the narcissism of decay.

Perla Arroyo affirms her Mexicanness in the recognition of contributions from other latitudes. Their desire to know is complemented and enriched by the views of those others who are interlocutors and not adversaries. The sustained character, the integral nature, of Nahuatl thought, constitutes the backbone of her visual reflections, which make her a worthy heir to the ancient tlamatinimethose wise men from far away who “knew things”, and tlacuiloquethose who wrote while painting, or in this case sculpting and modeling in 3D. His is a contemporary look, a kind of syncretism that emphasizes, I insist, dynamic continuity, because change is an immanent value to this philosophy, where accidents and chance are valued and incorporated into the flow of the represented reality, as an image, as a reflection. This is the meaningful universe of Calavera Mexicana.