La exposición “Los Huesos del Universo” de Leandro Pesantes se realizó en el Museomático in Arte Contemporáneo de Cuenca de diciembre de 2021 a febrero de 2022. Publicamos el texto curatorial escrito por Rodolfo Kronfle Chambers y un registro fotográfico de la exposición y de las obras, cortesía de Fernando Piedra.
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Texto curatorial por Rodolfo Kronfle Chambers
Las pinturas recientes de Leandro Pesantes destacan paisajes fantásticos llenos de insinuaciones siderales, donde representa una naturaleza cargada de fenómenos alucinantes y atravesada por un repertorio de símbolos que remiten a lo divino, lo oculto, lo arcaico y lo ancestral.
En estas obras se decantan un cúmulo de experiencias que van desde sus reminiscencias infantiles acompañando a sus padres en sus tareas evangelizadoras, hasta la exploración de las montañas en su época de preparación para la prédica. Confluyen también imaginarios relativos a su filia por temas que expresan una comprensión del mundo como la cábala, la astrología, o los principios universales de la metafísica, así como también su interés por la cristalografía y la numerología.
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De izquierda a derecha (desde la segunda obra): Leandro Pesantes. Serie D3J4VU / Elementos. 50 x 40 cm. 2021; Serie D3J4VU / Ritual. 50 x 40 cm. 2021; Serie D3J4VU / Osiris. 50 x 40 cm. 2021; Serie D3J4VU / Astral. 50 x 40 cm. 2021; Serie D3J4VU / Amuletos. 50 x 40 cm. 2021. Fotografía: Fernando Piedra
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Pesantes pondera por ello el valor poético de lo ritual, atento a la energía purificadora que desprenden los amuletos, incorporando y codificando en varios de sus objetos, esculturas e instalaciones diversos materiales naturales en estado de transformación, utilizándolos en clave de ofrenda.
Cada paisaje-visión se puede entender como un pequeño relato donde se manifiestan sucesos anclados en lo mágico. En estos destacan cabezas cuya presencia totémica las insinúa como guardianas del mundo: seres videntes a los que se revela la sabiduría escondida en la naturaleza que atesoran. Son personajes que surgen espontáneamente de un diálogo con la pintura misma, aprovechando la espontaneidad de la pincelada gestual y la mancha, a partir de las cuales se van modelando las sugerencias figurativas y los elementos más definidos.
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Leandro Pesantes. P3N74GR4M4 (columna central). Objeto, madera, estructura de barro fundido y velas, 2021.Fotografía: Fernando Piedra
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Leandro Pesantes. F∞RM45. Mixta, objetos de madera, 2021. Fotografía: Fernando Piedra
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En sus cuadros el artista suele incluir además palabras al borde de lo legible que adquieren un rol ideográfico, por medio de las cuales refuerza los sentidos esenciales de su búsqueda. Pero más sutil aún es la inscripción que hace de cifras y dígitos, apelando a la influencia que puede lograr su “vibración secreta”, afirmada en la creencia que establece una relación oculta entre los números, los seres vivos y las fuerzas espirituales.
Los números han sido llamados “los huesos del universo”, y en esa metáfora puede residir algo fundamental alrededor de lo cual orbita su obra: la necesidad de percibir la realidad circundante a través de la intuición, el augurio y la atención a lo profético, promoviendo el uso de una sensibilidad trascendente que se aleje del inmediatismo y la racionalidad extrema.
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Leandro Pesantes. Los huesos del universo (izquierda). Mixta sobre tela 200×230 cm. 2021. Fotografía: Fernando Piedra
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Leandro Pesantes. F∞RM45. Mixta, objetos de madera, 2021. Fotografía: Fernando Piedra
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Leandro Pesantes. F∞RM45. Mixta, objetos de madera, 2021. Fotografía: Fernando Piedra
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De izquierda a derecha: Leandro Pesantes. Non Site. Mixta sobre lienzo. 39 x 30 cm. 2018; Leandro Pesantes. Non Site. Mixta sobre lienzo. 60 x 40 cm. 2018; Leandro Pesantes. Non Site. Mixta sobre lienzo. 33 x 25 cm. 2018. Fotografía: Fernando Piedra
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Pared izquierda, de izquierda a derecha: Leandro Pesantes. Serie D3J4VU / Astral. 50 x 40 cm. 2021; Serie D3J4VU / Amuletos. 50 x 40 cm. 2021. Fotografía: Fernando Piedra
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De izquierda a derecha: Leandro Pesantes. Non Site. Mixta sobre lienzo. 39 x 30 cm. 2018; Non Site. Mixta sobre lienzo. 60 x 40 cm. 2018; Non Site. Mixta sobre lienzo. 33 x 25 cm. 2018; 3I3M3NT∞5. Objetos, barro fundido, cactus, rama, 2021. Fotografía: Fernando Piedra
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-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEtKs438nZo&t=2s
Vistas de la exhibición “Los Huesos del Universo”. Exposición en Museomático.–
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Leandro Pesantes B. Con Saturno como regente de signo Capricornio ascendente a Aries [With Saturn ruling the Capricorn ascendant in Aries] (Guayaquil, 1986). Visual artist. Trained at the Instituto Tecnológico de Artes del Ecuador (I.T.A.E,) and obtained a degree in Visual Arts from the Universidad de las Artes in Guayaquil, majoring in painting and sculpture. He currently lives and works in Guayaquil, Ecuador.
In my research and my work, I seek to generate dialogues between the various media afforded by the visual arts; the most powerful dialogues are those involving painting and sculpture. The composition of space, and the distribution of forms and pigments, are among the core issues I explore when reinvesting matter with its deeply symbolic character, focusing on animals and the nature of things, and probing the tension and accident of ritual; a whole range of elements (plants, bones, shells, feathers, etc.) are drawn together, later to be returned to nature in the form of offerings.
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LEANDRO PESANTES AND THE BONES OF THE UNIVERSE
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Leandro Pesantes’ work engages with mystery, dreams and the mystical dimension of the Symbolist tradition. His fondness for esoteric knowledge prompts a reverential attempt to grasp the imperceptible, probe the limits of the mind and lay bare the essence that lies behind appearances.
Concerns of this kind tend to spring from a biographical substrate, which in this case can be traced to the artist’s upbringing in a Baptist household. From his earliest childhood, he accompanied his parents on their evangelical work, not only around the city but often in rural areas; journeying over mountains and through forests, he was marked by the idea of “saving souls”. To an insight sharpened by this elevated spiritual mission, the physical features of the terrain – from trees to rocks – inevitably assumed animistic overtones, as Pesantes mentally endowed them with an ethereal substance.
By 2007, he had been baptized and started his missionary training in the Peruvian village of Saltur, close to the royal tombs of the indigenous Lord of Sipán; here, he was exposed to sensory experiences in which religious devotion was interwoven with folk wisdom and traditional healing practices rooted in the natural world. This learning process was later blended with the study of art, providing Pesantes with a means of conveying the intuition acquired through what he regarded as revelatory experiences.
Like the stars, numbers shine with an eternal
reality that transcends language and
geography. They have been called “the bones
of the universe” because they are archetypes
symbolizing the interrelationship of all things
mortal and immortal.
Words express man’s ideas; numbers express
God’s realities.
Sallie Nichols
Jung and Tarot, An Archetypal Journey
In recent years, Pesantes’ paintings – exhibited in De la nada a la existencia [From Void to Existence] (2020) and 54N7U4R1∞ 519 7148 (2021) – have focused on fantastic landscapes quickened by the hint of distant stars, in which he interprets a nature fraught with hallucinatory phenomena and shot through with a whole range of symbols relating not just to the divine, but also to the magical, the occult, the archaic and the ancestral. These works convey a whole compendium of memories: from the mountains he explored during his years training for the ministry to a highly-imaginative survey of his current fascination with subjects like the Kabbalah, astrology or the universal principles of metaphysics. To all this he adds an interest in experimental sciences such as crystallography (used in structural analysis to determine the arrangement of atoms in solid objects) and in other less mainstream scientific beliefs, particularly numerology.
The often-subtle inscription of figures and numbers in his pictures bespeaks his belief in the potential influence of a “secret vibration”, born of the hidden relationship between these numbers, living beings and spiritual forces. He also tends to include almost-legible words or phrases whose ideographic function serves to enhance the transcendental sense of his quest.
Pesantes approaches each piece as a short story, peopled by characters, masks and spirits which form part of a particular landscape-vision, but which in turn spring unbidden from a dialogue with the painting itself, in which the artist makes visual use of material furnished by the accidental, spontaneous appearance of patches, and also of hinted, sometimes-indecipherable images prompted by a sweeping brushstroke unrelated to the theme depicted. Those heads, awesome in their totemic presence, are cast as world guardians: seers to whom the wisdom hidden in nature has been vouchsafed. These figures vary in form and attributes, and their faces are often etched with a fine mesh of lines resembling scarifications. The settings in which they are placed are alive with phenomena rooted in the magical, whose presence seems to prompt the need to engage with the surrounding reality through intuition, through omens, through an alertness to the prophetic; a kind of redemptive or ecstatic personal knowledge attained through gnosis, to which few are granted access. Pesantes’ pictures, in the last analysis, seem to highlight the importance of this transcendental sensibility, which shuns immediatism and extreme rationality, releasing our own internal light and the pure breath of the spirit.
Pesantes also ponders the poetic value of ritual, alert to the cleansing energy radiating from amulets; in the same way, several of his works and installations include natural materials in a state of transformation, which function here as offerings: branches, wax, clay, ceramic, feathers, thorns, wool, wood, ash, rust, etc. In the way they are presented and codified, these items assume what appears to be a devotional purpose, almost as objects of worship. Pesantes explores the readily-perceptible energy emanating from them, turning them into ceremonial talismans whose mythical quality resides in the realms of the unknown.
Barthes argued that “the picture, whoever writes it, exists only in the account given of it”. In that sense, the role played by every subjective interpretation of the artist’s works will enrich the works themselves as language. Pesantes’ works seem to reflect his awareness that they are in fact constructed through “plural description”; to that end, they provide a system of open-ended codes whose density lies in precisely that collective fabulation.
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Leandro Pesantes catálogo Rodolfo Kronfle Ch 2021
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