Bendiciones

Spirituality, universe, nature, and ancestral people are some of the concepts that the Peruvian artist Kylla Piqueras (granddaughter of the sculptor and architect Manuel Piqueras Cotolí) addresses in her work, who ventures into different art disciplines, as part of a deep and insatiable spiritual quest. Having initially trained to be a dancer, in her performances she uses the moving body as a means for self-healing and connection with the universe. “I am dedicated to improvising through dance, using the body as a vehicle for communication with the surrounding world, but in a very intimate manner. In a way, it is what I experience in my pictorial creation process as well, which is why the exhibitions have a scenic experience attached to them. While I develop my pieces, movement, images, and visions also arise, and they are manifested as a story to be told and that at the same time closes the exhibition,” the artist explains.

Likewise, she has spent 15 years investigating the wealth of the medicinal plants of Peru and studying the sacred symbolism of different spiritual traditions around the world, which she integrates into her corpus of works. Kylla lived for over 10 years in the Peruvian Andes investigating ancient textile techniques that are reflected in her series Mantos de oración, where she prepares and intervenes textiles, a constructive process that she tunes into with meditation. The artist claims that “these traditional crafts are truly – as Western science now confirms – methods of meditation, ways to access consciousness through meditative action, accessing the intangible information of nature. From this direct perception of nature and that rhythm of life, I understood that each instant that I dedicated to a specific embroidery piece was a prayer.” Here, we see a diversity of techniques, textures, and colors, among them ink for dyeing, painting with acrylic, serigraphy, glitter, embroidery, gemstones, and carving. This way, she expresses different popular, indigenous, and ancestral art forms to transport them to a cultural syncretism in a contemporary language.

However, the images that Kylla incorporates, with that mixture of symbolism, such as the coiled snake – an allegory of wisdom, sensuality, and vital strength – above which lies the Virgin of Guadalupe, refer to the notion of Latin American baroque. This baroque style was marked by the combination of elements from both the European catholic church and the local indigenous imaginary who appropriated outside representation to give them a new character and sense through the original synthesis and reinvention. That is how the devotion for the Virgin of Guadalupe represents the intangible forces of Mother Earth, which is expressed in the titles of the works of art-cape.

Thus, the incorporation of the popular and ancestral takes on a special relevance in her pieces that are charged with color, saturation, and exacerbation of elements, such as roses, in addition to the sumptuous frames and their designs with flowers and plants, with baroque and rococo traces. Always from the perspective of an essential concern: the spiritual connection to Earth and the universe, whose purpose is never to simply to create beautiful objects, but rather a way of understanding and approaching the world we inhabit to find in it our place and express the conscious energy of the process.

Text: Arte Al Límite, «Fibras Latinoamericanas. 40 mujeres artistas»