Wisdom traditions tend to organize the universe via its elements. Air, earth, water, and fire form the four poles of a cross; representing and signaling the road a disciple must follow. The cross – be it in Christianity or pre-Hispanic worldview – changes of symbolism as one penetrates its mystery; it is then when the fifth element is awakened: Ether. Some interpret ether as the “way of the heart”, the “universe´s womb”: the stellar road that leads us into the source, the Wuji of taosim or the Aristotelian immobile generator.
Having mentioned the above, Gestación Etérea of Angella Holguin can be decoded from these sapiential backgrounds. The winged, vegetal, marine, totemic forms and materials (steel, textile, skin, wood, ceramics, marble, resin) of this sculptural garden are related in function of an ethereal principle. The aesthetics and discourse signal towards an untranslatable shadow zone; and the conjunction of opposites expresses a law, common to all mysticism, deciphered here in dynamic and rooted figures.
The artist’s job is in consonance with the vision of mother civilizations, in which art and its privilege were a spontaneous fruit of self-knowledge quests. Here, there are no esthetic show offs or intellectual imbroglios; as opposite to contemporary styles, this exhibition gives birth and leads us into the route towards the sources, Eden or primeval garden where beauty, love, and the spirit reigned in a circular dance of brotherhood, nurture and harmony.
But ¿how to perceive these languages?
Through their perfume, say those who have taken these paths. Just by opening our senses and cleansing our sight—they assure— it is possible to be reborn.