MAZENETT QUIROGA
Devouring Fire I, 2022
Oil painting, gold leaf on camouflage canvas fabric
200 X 140 cm
Devouring Fire II, 2022
Oil painting, gold leaf on camouflage canvas fabric
200 X 140 cm
Devouring Fire III, 2022
Oil painting, gold leaf on camouflage canvas fabric
200 X 140 cm
Installation view at NightVision, 2022 LAGE EGAL [Kimgo] Berlin
Photographer: Sandra Gramm
Courtesy of the Berlin Art Prize
The fire spreads through an enigmatic and exuberant space, a kind of epiphany and ambiguity between dream and reality. The background of the painting is a camouflaged canvas, a technology developed specifically for people to merge with the tropical rainforest landscape and be transformed into it.
Between the flames and the vegetation (People-plant), a mystical apparition takes place, two jaguars dressed in gold are outlined in the background of the image, in a dancing movement around the flames. This image reminds us of the mythologies of native Amerindian cultures, which tell us that the origin of the jaguar's spots is related to a blazing fire that burned its skin, leaving the black spots it has on its body today.
This work explores the natural cycle of fire, an element of great ecological relevance that has been related to the history of forests and their inhabitants, as an element of life and renewal, but that due to climate change and the suppression of fire by modern societies, seems to have gone out of control of its regular cycles and now we see the consequences in different forests around the world. Some fluorescent fungi appear as beings and spirits of the forest, communicating through luminous signals. These paintings, in the same way as the jaguars, are crepuscular, that is to say that they are situated in a liminal space between day and night, they transit between these two worlds and realities.