The Invisible Forest

Brus Rubio

Artist in residence A self-taught painter and descendant of the original peoples of Huitoto and Bora, of the Peruvian Amazon, Brus Rubio was born in 1984, in the community of Pucaurquillo, located in the basin of the Ampiyacu River in Loreto, Peru. As a child, he heard fantastic stories from his parents while at the farm fishing or talking at home in the dark Amazonian nights. These stories sustained his sensitivity to nature and fed his imagination about the great mysteries of life. In 2002, Rubio met the anthropologist Jürg Gasché, who was conducting cultural studies based on the ancestors and sages of his people. For the next three years together with Gasché, he spent time in the maloca, listening and learning from their knowledge, their songs, stories and their great wisdom. During this period, he also grew to understand the researcher’s way of learning, Western anthropological thinking, and reflexive criticism. This experience taught him about his own culture and about the importance of dialoguing and interacting with different cultures. It was during those years that Rubio began to paint and he soon discovered his passion for painting as a way to express the infinite richness of mythology, history and the culture of his people. Eventually his style evolved so as to communicate moredirectly with a non- indigenous audience, but each new painting took him back to the maloca to continue learning from the wise and to immortalise their wealth.

Roldan Pinedo

Roldan Pinedo is a Shipibo artist from the community of San Francisco, in the district of Yarinacocha of the central Peruvian Amazon. Born on March 30, 1971, his name inShipibo is Shoyan Shëca, the same name given to his grandfather meaning restless mouse. His paintings are steeped in Shipibo mythology representing his visions with ayahuasca and the environment of the Amazon, the complex richness of its flora and fauna. Pinedo is largely self-taught and has participated in numerous exhibitions in Peru and abroad. Early on in his career, Pinedo was invited to Lima by the renowned historian Dr. Pablo Macera as part of a team of painters from different regions of Peru. Dr. Maceda famously provided Pinedo, his wife Elena Valera, and other Indigenous artists with a context in which to produce paintings of the animals and plants of the jungle, as well as the customs and experiences of his people. They were the first from their community to paint in this manner. Traditional Shipibo painting known as kené are designs incorporated onto fabrics, ceramics, and on the body. These intricate geometric patterns of great complexity are the heritage of their ancestors. Traditionally Shipibo pattern designs come from the plants’ sacred healing energies and are the codes of the “ikaros,” or songs, that express the powers experienced by the healers who “see the songs” and “hear the designs” in their visions. Inspired by these traditions, Pinedo paints the visions that he has while taking ayahuasca, representing the spirits of the jungle that the plant shows him. Pinedo sustains himself as an artist by traveling back and forth from the jungle to the capital. He also travels internationally having participated in various group and solo exhibitions including “The Green Eye” at Telefónica (Lima, Perú 2000), “Ancestral Vision” at Tremaine Gallery, Hotchkiss School (Connecticut, USA 2004), “El Poder Verde” at Spanish Cultural Center (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2009), various Rurak Maki exhibitions in Lima, Peru and at the Irish Georgian Society (Dublin, Ireland 2018). Currently he is part of the group exhibition “Amazonias,” Peru en Arco at Matadero (Madrid, Spain).

Miguel Vilca

Miguel Vilca, often referred to as an “Amazonista,” is originally from Arequipa in the Peruvian Andes and has been living in the central Amazonian city of Pucallpa since 1999. Unlike all of the other artists in this group exhibition who are from the Amazonian jungle, Miguel’s Andean Indigeneity sets him apart. His oblique gaze incorporates a reference to Western Christian motifs seldom seen in Amazonian artists’ works yet not absent from the region’s colonialist past. The artist Miguel Vilca revives the testimonies of abandoned and forgotten bodies; feminine bodies exuding myths through the very pores of their existence, “somewhere between redemption and sin, betrayal and love, the fear of punishment and the longing for light,” he claims. Through his exquisitely rendered charcoal drawings, Miguel Vilca evokes the Western classical masters (Caravaggio, Rubens, Zurbarán) avoiding in his words “the false shamans and the elusive icaros.” These female figures alone bear the weight of a story, the same story that broke their spirit. Here they are resurrected within their own Shipibo world hovering between the classic and the exotic. Here, the river and its shadow travel the same path. For Miguel, the river is of course the Amazon and its various tributaries; the shadow his rendition of it.

Lastenia Canayo

Lastenia Canayo was born in 1962 in Roroboya, Bajo Ucayali in the central Peruvian Amazon. She is a respected member of the shipibo-konibo people. Her native name is Pecon Quena, “The one who calls the colours.” Her mother Maetsa Rahua, “The one who sees Sound”, and her grandfather taught her how to work with ceramics. Later she explored painting and embroidery. Her visual repertoire introduces us to the cultural universe of Ybo / Yoshin, teachers, mothers, demons, and other powerful entities that protect Amazonian animals, plants and other beings of nature. Through her animistic conception of nature, Lastenia visualises the various protective beings or owners of plants and animals represented in her painting and embroidery pieces. Early on in her career she participated in an intercultural dialogue with researchers from the Andean Rural History Workshop at the National University of San Marcos (UNMSM), under the direction of the historian Pablo Macera and has since participated in various international exhibitions. In 2014, the Peruvian Ministry of Culture recognised Lastenia with the prestigious title of Meritorious Personality of Culture.

Elena Valera

Jimena Pindeo Valera and Estefany Pinedo Valera Elena Valera was discovered in Lima at the end of the 1990s by the historian and collector of Shipibo art, Pablo Macera. Her art has been taken to several countries in Europe and been exhibited countless times in Lima. Now, she uses the soil in the forest to dye and design her fabrics, and to capture what she has experienced in her community. Jimena Pinedo Valera and Estefany Pinedo Valera are Elena Valera’s children.

Rember Yahuarcani and Santiago Yahuarcani

The work of the artist Rember Yahuarcani takes a visual journey through the myths and stories of the beings that populate the physical and spiritual universe of the Amazon. His learning began with his father Santiago Yahuarcani, while he listened to stories told by his grandmother, Martha López. Exhibiting in galleries since 2003, Yahuarcani seeks to present his works as pieces of contemporary art, certainly rooted in indigenous history and tradition, but with an evolution, style and identity of its own.