FUEGO
Cristina Regalado Ramos
January 31 - March 28
Liber Ignis or a Flame in Comprehension.
"There are very few differences between art and magic.
For me the supreme act of magic is to create something from nothing."
Alan Moore
There is an undeniable inheritance, like a robust but sometimes barely visible thread, between art and spirituality. The direct relationship between the two was for centuries the seed of History, a seed that has slowly atrophied into a prejudice in which one cancels out the other and vice versa, generating an indescribable spite between belief, form, and life. But this art-spirituality binomial is well known to be indestructible, whether its use is for the oppression of life or for its liberation.
It is impossible not to think of Hildegard von Bingen's inner fire when she had her visions—visions that were prophecies, but also music, writing, and even sexology while leading an Abbey—or the electric fire of Rosaleen Norton—the Witch of Kings Cross—whose paintings and performances mixed an anarchist sensibility with methodologies of self-hypnosis, sexual magic, and neopaganism, often leading to her being pursued by the law.
Cristina Regalado's work navigates precisely between those cracks of the Great Binomial where rational understanding is only a micro-part of a Whole. Following in the footsteps of other artists and visionaries, feminists and those of a libertarian leaning like Josefa Tolrà, Regalado practices a methodology that is her own and purely hers, where textiles are part of a desacralized Trinity: research, practice, and intuition. The artist walks the streets of La Orotava, her hometown, speaking with neighbors to collect materials from people who have passed away. These materials are transformed into multiple experimental proposals where research around local belief and superstitions unfolds, expanding with countercultural currents such as Chaos Magic, Santería, and mystery in the broadest Lynchean spectrum. Among this amalgamation of knowledge, her work reveals a strong biographical and almost literary character in which the tension of belief, on the one hand, becomes violence, and on the other, a liberation from pain.
Large textile pieces lead us to stories—almost landscapes—of a mind that expands like a front of defense against suffering, discrimination, and the anxiety of a violent world. Small textile pieces, somewhere between assemblage and text, lead us to heretical scapulars. The devotional scapulars of Catholicism are accompanied by promises of protection or even eternal condemnation, while Regalado leaves it open to our comprehension where we stand before them: are they jungum (yokes) or scutum (shields)? Tarot cards with unique iconography are displayed with the artist's own personal symbolism as a mechanism to predict how many cognitive layers we are confronting. A gesture that reminds us of a Leonora Carrington who tasted the sweetness of recognition but also the bitterness of psychiatric and sexual violence.
The artist's generosity in opening up her interior for our comprehension is also a gesture of methodological dissent in which the touch, the smell, and the materials brought in make us question the oligarchy. The oligarchy present in the Canary Islands, whose power is transmitted through blood and belief, but also the religious oligarchy, and the oligarchy of the hegemony of "normality." The fire that Regalado invokes is a purifying fire in the most occultist sense of the word.
A table with her belongings, an embroidered tablecloth, in which we can faintly discern a text sewn in the same tone as the fabric, almost illegible, where a fragment reads: The road is narrowing. I can barely see anymore. It's five in the afternoon, but the mountains already gray with the incipient darkness only let the remains of the sun pass through. If the sun had died in that place forever, I don't think anyone would have been surprised.
We do not know if the sun has died, but we do know that the Fire continues, like a song of vengeance and reparation to all those who were stained and forgotten.
Raisa Maudit
