THE RETURN OF THE MYTH. JOSÉ MOLINA, ZAIDA DEL RIO Y EDUARDO ROCA “CHOCO”

Curated by Adriana Herrera, PhD

The current world— as the great mythologist Roberto Calasso affirms— is a world without myths. But timeless archetypes nest in the depths of our imagination. With the persistence of the plants that make their way through the cracks of cement to defeat it— an image described by Alejo Carpentie in Los Pasos Perdidos —the trail of myths returns amidst the uncertainty of today's world. The convergence of very old images that are used in a new way, connecting them to the spaces of present time to talk about how much we fear or surpass the limits of our reason, emerges as a deep call to a common memory. It is not about the memory of historical events, but about what makes us human, about an evocation of what is in the deepest regions of the psyche: it is the memory of essential human actions. The ways of narrating and imagining where we come from, where we are going, or how to find the path when we are feeling our way through the dark, also nourishes art of multiple places and times. In a text by Manuel J. Borja Villel, in which he tackles the idea of the new mythologies, he refers to the existence of "imagined worlds on the part of the most diverse individuals rooted in very different geographic and chronological coordinates". The Return of the Myth proposes a dialogue with the works of the Spanish resident in Italy, José Molina, and of the Cubans Zaida del Río and Eduardo "Choco" Roca Salazar, in which the proximity between the surrealist thought and the connected mythical imaginaries is linked to ancient iconographies of Europe, Africa and America. Their paintings, drawings, engravings and sculptures refer to ancestral stories of the origin; and the relationship between humans and nature from new mythologies reappear as mirrors of the present and their anxieties. The title of the exhibition project, paraphrases the famous book The Myth of the Eternal Return, in which Mircea Eliade addresses the different ways of returning to the origin presented in the paradises imagined by the human being. Faced with the paradoxes of history —and the suffering it inflicts —nostalgia arises from a lost or promised land and from new ways of reconnection with the essential. The imaginary figures of José Molina, Zaida del Río, and Eduardo "Choco" Roca Salazar configure spaces of imaginative freedom, and while they take paths back to ancient poetics, they also open the way to renewed ways of bringing the human kingdom closer to the animal and to the vegetable kingdoms, and to find the sacred: the incessant search for a return to a co-existence between nature and civilization, and between the human and The Divine. José Molina (Madrid, Spain, 1965. Lives and works in Italy) Molina paints with the background of the Spanish pictorial tradition. In the Prado Museum he saw from his adolescence again and again "Everything from Goya and Velázquez": two "monsters" of painting that "speak much more of humanity than any history book."

In the works chosen for The Return of the Myth, Molina's extraordinary trade as a draftsman is noticed as well as his vision of anthropological-philosophical character. Lucy is a strange and wonderful return to the figure of a naked and sleeping Eve that has the wings of a mythical angel and in turn is held in the

enormous hands of a hominid. It is an imaginary evocation of "Lucy", the Australopithecus afarensis, named by Donald Carl Johanson’s paleontologist team who found her bones, which were more than three million years old, in Ethiopia. Molina’s Lucy is a tribute to this ancient Eve from which we came from, as well as a poetic evocation of how existentially the human being is between angels and animals. The tiny Lucy, held in the palm of a giant Australopithecus, has the wings of the dreams of humanity. She rests confidently in the kingdom that emerges from nature, and her awakening deems her the "Mother of all of us".

Molina knows that the curse of humanity has been on the limited anthropocentrism that makes him deny all other forms of life. He was a sailor and understood that compared to the immensity of the sea, to what extent we are "a tiny particle in a universe". In Molina's personal mythology, the divine is closely linked to the animal kingdom. He believes in Espinoza’s God, in the particles of the divine present in each being. As an artist he resorts to his own mythical vision "to give a measure of the human being who is destined to change his perspective". In the piece La madre muerta, a game of scales and interaction between the kingdoms is presented again. We do not know if the human feet sunk in the waters are enormous or if the cetacean is tiny, but in the disproportion there is an excess of the territoriality of the human species displacing everything in its path. "I thought of this painting," says Molina, "when the coral reef of Australia collapsed. The news seemed dismal and practically unnoticed ... The scene is completed with a skeleton that appears behind the two figures floating on the surface. "

From the series of questions, a set of drawings that formulate a poetic restlessness, we have chosen two questions related to mythical beings: a winged unicorn in gestation, and the eye of an adult unicorn. The first is accompanied by the question "How long does it take to start a god?" And the second two sentences: "Did you never see that sweet creature in the dark? Did you never see love where you least expected it? “The figure of the

unicorn in the Middle Ages embodied a mode of psychic purity, of what is uncontaminated in the human being. The nostalgia for the unicorn is also the search for spaces not trampled by our voracity. The work refers to the ability to rise towards the sacred or to seek, within itself, a gap of tenderness that not only saves the world and the species itself but also everything that exists.

Instead of centaurs that are knowledgeable of ancient medicine, Molina imagines that the present is full of rooster-men running through a desolate Old World and paints them with both virtuosity and sharpness. In front of the diverse apocalypse that lurks, and in front of the borders "where the gods die", it maintains that the new man of the Vitruvius must be conscious of its smallness. "It is important to recover certain primary

and primordial values," says José Molina. His painting is also a way of altering the borders of the usual human perspective confined to a blind anthropocentrism that separates us, as Levi-Strauss lamented, from the animal world and makes us unable to see the entire earth from another position.

Zaida del Río (Villa Clara, Cuba, 1954. Lives and works in Cuba)

Zaida del Río grew up in a country house in Guadalupe, Zulueta, in a municipality of Villa Clara, Cuba, and her experiences of landscapes and animals is inseparable from the perception of “the body of the earth” as connected with her senses. But there is no naïveté in her aesthetics: she has been a master of engraving and drawing, and she pours into the poetic recreation of a tropical universe, associations that refer to the history of art and to the narrations of the different religions that establish symbolic relations between the sacred and the three kingdoms. The anthropo-zoomorphic figures, common in ancestral mythologies, populate her visual universe, but in addition, many of her works could configure visual representations of the founding poems of Sappho, the

great initiator of the lyric genre. Although in her different stages, her changing iconography has recreated figures of horses or circus characters, a distinctive sign in her work is the presence of women's kingdoms - usually with a bird’s head - that multiply the fecundity rites and nourishes with the relationship with nature, as well as with ancient Greek pottery.

The representations of human figures with the head of a bird go back to the 90s when she painted a man with the head of a bird. Later, she invented a

mask to hide her face from a story inspired by Afro-Cuban religion. "As Yemayá lives six months in the sea and six months in the mountains, I invented that she disguised herself as a bird because she loved - like me - the singing of birds and being surrounded by them". The bird-women appear without perspectives, juxtaposed, floating, fused with the elements -land, water and air- in an aesthetic that evokes the rustic origin of the artist: a place of mountains and fresh waters, without electric lights, where she could bathe naked like the Greek Artemis, without being seen. "I always say that I paint myself and my own feminine or masculine spirits and that I do an autobiographical work, although they are not realistic self-portraits." In Plenilunio, the central woman whose figure is half-covered by vegetation that grows on her own skin is a sort of alter-ego for Zaida. "My name is Full Moon in the Palo Monte Rule (Afro-Cuban practice)." Interestingly, All You Need is Love, the most famous portrait of Zaida del Rio, painted by Flavio Garciandía when she was 20 years old, shows her lying on the grass. She herself unfolds and multiplies in the female figures with masked faces that surround her.

Her work not only fuses distant iconographies -reminiscences of the Greco-Latin world to the carnivals of Venice as much as keys to Afro-Cuban symbolism- but incorporates poetic allusions, often inspired by the free verses of José Martí: "That last book he wrote before coming to Cuba where death awaited him. He has been betrayed by everyone. Nobody believes in him. “That vision of vulnerability, of a touching nudity inspires works of masked beings. Zaida has likewise incorporated oriental mythologies and fantastic tales

of all times. She has done series inspired by the movements of animals that recreates Tai-Chi. The rooster that appears in the Chinese calendar is a recurring figure in paintings where, by contrast, female images appear only as background. "In the past," she narrates, "men did not rest because they went out every day to look for the sun without knowing where they would find it. And then the rooster took the chore of

announcing the day so that the men could rest. "

The peacocks that travel in a female universe are also images of connection with the ancient Greek mythology, but worked in an autobiographical way. If, as the famous painting by Rubens “Juno and Argos” evokes, the feathers of the peacock are one hundred eyes of the ancient guardian of Hera, the Zaida del Río’s peacocks protect the memory of her childhood. The same is true of her immersions in other ancient religions and her dialogues with goddesses of Hinduism: all figures seek a return to communion with the land of their origin. Eduardo Roca Salazar, “Choco” (Santiago de Cuba, 1949. Lives and works in Cuba)

Cuban artist Choco —National Prize for Visual Arts of Cuba 2017 — evokes the iconic Afro-Cuban sources and their ways of representing the sacred by reiterating the unity between the human kingdom and the animal kingdom, whose creatures protect and extend their magic to the existence of man on earth.

The countryside where he was born is full of references to the Afro-Cuban religion, of which he is not a practitioner, but which nurtures a visual syncretism in his artwork that not only pertains to beliefs but to times as well. "What I want to symbolize," Choco says, "is a cultural language that still connects animals and plants with people{s mystical states."

The use in popular culture of extended practices to speak with t he kingdom of nature inspires works such as Hombre Con Pez or Mujer Con Hoja de Tabaco that reveal that interaction. In the first work, the human figure and the fish have the same dimensions and form a figure in a streched connection. It is a piece that uses similar graphical resources in both bodies to

capture the rituality linked to beliefs: "fish —Choco explains —are used in towns to cleanse the spirit. It is placed on the head and then thrown into the sea, the mountain, or the rivers, depending on the matter." In formal terms, the treatment of the body of the blue fish and copper man evokes the close spiritual dialogue between the human and animal kingdom.

Choco—who is not religious— thus embodies the role of the anthropologist and transports the ancestral beliefs to the visual universe with his rigorous training of engraver and painter. On the one hand, he was a pupil of Antonia Eiriz and of Servando Cabrera and preserves not only the expressionist legacy of the first but also the lessons of her work with her neighborhood. The value of myths is inseparable from social dialogues for him. He had a parallel formation in the Taller Experimental de Gráfica, and with Armando Posse and Nelson Domínguez before other lessons in this field in New York. Numerous works by him have been made in the technique of engraving in which he has achieved mastery: the collagraphy.

The curatorial project also includes a drawing on paper in very early Chinese ink, made in Angola, where he was an art

teacher and was inspired by the vision of women in the area: "They carry the weight of the family, the work. I saw them walking with a type of oven on their heads: a large packet of wood to make the fire; and with the children behind." In the drawing, the branches of the corn are fused with the braids of a woman{s hair. She appears as a goddess or a mythical female figure. The curated project also incorporates a key animal in the mythologies of all America: the hummingbird. The version of the wooden sculpture has been covered with fragments of collagraphies.

An engraving like Cogido con presillas contains the figures of eyes with arrows, which are used in the houses to frighten evil spirits. It also has the matrix of the collagraphy, its all a handmade manipulation done almost in an informalistic way, and linked to the Afro-Cuban rituality: he used sea sand, a snail eye, and other elements considered sacred in certain zones, so he created textures that give the impression of three-dimensionality. His religious way of being has to do with the idea of reflecting the dialogues between all the kingdoms present in his culture and with the the closeness between popular practices and art.

The images contained in the works by José Molina, Zaida del Río and Choco, reunited in The Return of the Myth are related to an "archaic ontology" in Europe, America, and Africa, and express different modes of imagination that involve a call to the return of a relationship with the natural world and to a harmonious form of coexistence.