ABRECAMINOS by Juan Carlos León
"The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness."
-Paul Cézanne
We tend to believe that plants are not only aesthetic but also static because, unlike other beings, they lack feet-overlooking the fact that plants migrate. The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), considered Mexico's number one exported vegetable, is a fruit of Andean origin with more than 2,600 years of history; cacao (Theobroma cacao), an essential ingredient in Mexican cuisine, is a fruit that came from Ecuador; the jacaranda (Jacaranda mimosifolia), a tree with lilac blossoms, is a migratory species brought from South America during the 1950s, which has adapted to the Valley of Mexico and is now considered an essential part of contemporary Mexican flora. These are just a few examples showing that plants are not static, but adapt and proliferate in contexts different from their place of origin, sometimes even becoming indistinguishable from native vegetation. The same happens with people and beings who leave their original contexts to inhabit other spaces.
After participating in the SOMA educational program in Mexico City (2019-2021), Juan Carlos León (Guayaquil, 1984) identified a close and parallel connection between his condition as a migrant and the plants and rites that have journeyed across our continent over the centuries.
Likewise, we often believe that traditions and rites-almost in an ancestral sense-are carved in stone, that their nature and elements are unchangeable, ignoring the fact that they transform according to the context and nature of those who reenact them in each region, thus keeping them alive and in constant flux. In this sense, in the cosmos created, remembered, and transformed by Juan Carlos León, there is no single universal human experience, but rather multiple worlds coexisting simultaneously: a pluriversal human experience, in which we carry-not in a suitcase, but in our minds and bodies-our wars, beliefs, famines, scars, and lullabies; our rites, cuttings, and stems.
By analogy, Juan Carlos speaks of migration as an act as natural as it is poetic-like the passage of the wind or the flight of hummingbirds from one flower to another. León evokes the uncertainty of the unplanted seed, left instead upon the ground, with the hope of taking root and creating around it new biomes, new rites (or the same rites), with the same or with different plants.
Through his practice, León understands the will of what already exists by transforming it and making it his own: from the preexistence of a garden and its inhabitants to flowers abandoned inside a house. Through drawing and sculpture, Juan Carlos undertakes a personal search for a new form of botanical representation, moving away from the European canons imposed on Latin America since the colonial period.
By transforming flowers or branches into perennial objects through iron and metalwork, he captures the essence and spirit of these rites, exemplified by Abrecaminos, the central rite of the exhibition, which governs and shapes beginnings, decisions, and futures. Thus, the rites brought together here represent, at once, an exercise in mutation and resistance: rituals that think themselves in us and that, through contemplation, transform us.
- Manuel Tuda