PERUVIAN AMAZONIAN ART THROUGH THE HOCHSCHILD CORREA COLLECTION

Amazonía Contemporánea (Contemporary Amazonia), the title under which part of the collection is on display at Madrid's Lázaro Galdiano Museum, allows us to delve into that prolific production, braiding its anthropological and esthetic bases to understand the realities of the artistic ecosystem. Drawing political lines over a broad geography can have its risks. Let's assume that the division of modern states over indigenous cartography is an aberration in itself, but it may be justified if what is valued is the relationship to colonial heritage or the strength to maintain the identity of each community. 

Curated by Christian Bendayán and Luis Pérez Oramas, the exhibition traces the attitude and evolution of recent Peruvian art produced in the Amazon through the work of artists from different generations, which also facilitates the understanding of the concerns, themes and techniques, as well as their cultural background. It is also perceived the idea of unifying a local criterion, bringing together the proposals more rooted in the primitive with the more urban processes. 

This is where the themes are concentrated, the natural techniques used by Chonon Bensho as opposed to the use of other more artificial materials to give life to works that inherently maintain cohesion with the territory and point to the different ways of conceiving cosmography and cosmocentrism. In that own belief, the works of Smith Churay or Enrique Casanto turn to their own imaginary, without borrowings, purer in essence, while Luis Martinez Davil raises the religious syncretism as an identity, perhaps not so primitive, but equally validated by history.

Obviously, the tour leaves room for reflection on the transfers of aesthetics and their ways of representation. The importance of nature and its patterns and how these are understood within the most primitive system could clash against the evidence that, increasingly, reiterates that part of the contemporary western movements find their roots in that original essence. Fauvism and abstract geometry recognize their discovery in dreamlike pictorial techniques and magical content, but works such as those of Pablo César Amaringo Shuña or Dimas Paredes, for the former, or those of Olinda Silvano or Mary Rodríguez, for the latter, raise the question of whether, at present, the sense of direction is unique. 

The Peruvian Amazon shapes in its most current art an enriched and enriching world, which advocates a result united by the ancestral elements and by the lived history (and here the geopolitical division does make sense) and which debates between functionalism and aesthetics and which vindicates that conjunction with the natural, with spirituality and the exuberant, with that world that, whether with embroidery, wood or photographs, point in the same direction with multiple historiographic and, above all, anthropologically based edges.

Amazonía Contemporánea. Colección Hochschild Correa - Perú can be visited until April 6 at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Serrano, 122, Madrid (Spain).