Flower and boxes

In the city of Lima, the old town is the centre of the city. The colonial square grid allows you to walk around with complete predictability and find, here and there, small squares that give entrance to the many churches of elaborate facades, broken into pieces by the game of shadows the many sculptures in them create under the sunlight. Reversely, when you enter them, you submerge in the darkness.
And there, once inside, within the naves and corridors, you will find many facades repeated to the sides. Doors to celestial realms, but this time of engoldened wooden structures, rising up to the domes above you. Flowering in their multiple twisted columns, full of angels and saints, in a concert of profusion, order and chaos, silently echoing the sprawl and disorder outside their walls.
Its abundance, if we can call that, is inspired by the baroque retables in the colonial churches of South America, specifically in the relative flatness of its profusion, as opposed to, say, the Italian or Austrian baroque, characterised by their experimental tridimensionality. Heir of Spaniard churrigueresque, Andean baroque is formulated in another way; a planimetric profusion that remains within the frames of its structure, possibly inherited from the engraved monoliths of prehispanic America, conceited under a new reality. And like that, in the confusing profusion of its images, different beings cohabitate, zoomorphic creatures of pre-Columbian appearance with figures that belong to European design, like the carved caryatid-like characters or the flowers copied from Flemish paintings, just like the American artist did then.
But if you go out, back to the street, to the noise, you would find something more pressingly contemporary. Boxes also they can be related to display windows, and as such, to product exhibition, and commercialisation. What is in an exhibition? and why?.
For the object itself, well it is built around a detergent box is a receptacle where all these drawn adventures are held. A material that is not costly and that can not be called of costly nature. But, then, who is the one to say it? The collector? the artist?. These are little boxes that can be transported somehow easily, and as such, they exude nomadic, errant condition. Like the popular small retables that were used to be carried from town to town in the colonial times, and became characteristically from the region of Ayacucho, in the Andean region of the country.
The drawings inside the small box, which shares the same aesthetic approach of profusion mentioned above, are also, a personal depiction of a metaphoric MacLuhan’s man, connected to reality through devices and technology, his eyes covered to another reality outside those.
This work is part of a series of pieces that explore heavily the texture of the cardboard as a companion to the image depicted, starting a dialogue with it, just by virtue of its shapes and planes, a compromise between the clarity and perception of the unity of the image, and the geography of the makeshift canvas, a metaphoric ensemble of our fragmented perception of reality, a reality we try to assemble by joining our pieces of knowledge and reasoning.
The work made in these boxes is a play about the sense of profusion and chaos, which relate to how complicated the world is. Mainly it proposes a reality where chaos is orderly, and order is chaotic and challenging to comprehend. Boards with “meaning” try to give the work a sense; too literally, the meaning is just a word lost in the work. Chaos is an order, and the order is chaotic. Meaning construction is in this work, to me, an attempt to understand the world, or the cosmos as part of our daily life, organising it with the hope to arrive at a system where everything has a place and a sense of purpose, like pushing Sisyphus’ rock.