Federico Guzmán (Seville, 1964), an artist who began working in the mid-1980s, is characterised by his commitment to the contexts in which he lives. On the basis of his personal experience, he gains a critical, sensitive and emotional awareness of these places, both as a social fabric endowed with memory and as a natural environment, occasionally carrying out collaborative interventions of an activist nature that question the notion of authorship. Indeed, he regards himself as an extension of nature both as an artist and as a human being, and this idea is evident in his production of recent decades.
These experiences occur in places that were once very far-flung but today, in a globalised world, are just a few hours away, like South America and the Western Sahara. Particularly because they are well represented in the Banco de España Collection, we can draw special attention to a number of pieces that emerged from his experiences in Colombia, a country with which he has held very close ties since the 1990s: Yagé (2000), a painting that follows the patterns of a photograph; Theobroma cacao (2000), a scientific drawing with post-colonial overtones; La dueña de la yuca (The Lady of the Yucca, 2000), a psychedelic collage; and Bacano (1998), drawings and texts scrawled on a background with motifs that recall the jungle and make reference to a place that Guzmán found “bacano”, meaning pleasant.
On occasions, his works are based on indigenous rituals to propitiate favours from the gods. For example, he carried out an artistic experiment whose central element was the yucca. To ensure a good harvest, the following liturgy is performed: the “lord of the yucca” invites neighbours, friends and relatives to the harvest of this tuber and oversees its production and distribution, while the “lady of the yucca” has a similar role with the woman guests, though under the supervision of her husband. The consumption of the drink yagé also forms part of this rite, which connects two of the pieces in the Banco de España Collection.
For the cacao tree, present in this exhibition in the form of the piece Theobroma cacao, Federico Guzmán evades depicting the fruit, reducing it merely to a large leaf. The Andalusian artist sublimates it not only by enlarging it but also by presenting it upright and frontally, occupying almost all the paper, as though it were a divinity, a kind of Romanesque pantocrator. This work by Fernando Guzmán also takes a sideways glance at botanical treatises, whose illustrations were often done by women.
Cocoa is known to have been used for at least 3,500 years in what is now South America, which aligns it with the very history of mankind in a similar way to worldwide foodstuffs like beer and bread. Cocoa recipes are extremely diverse, ranging from bio products to a very wide range of chocolates and to pure garbage in which the manufactured product barely has any more of the fruit than its name. In pre-Columbian cultures, however, cocoa formed part of numerous religious rites and bitter and intoxicating potions (sweetening it with sugar cane came later, under colonisation, when it was called ‘pig water’ because of its colour). It was also considered to have medicinal properties, which is of some consequence today because it is still an appetiser for the soul that helps in stressful situations. Moreover, it came to be used, like salt, as a currency for commercial exchange. For centuries, millions of intercontinental voyages between America, Asia, Europe and Africa (the continent that is today the world’s largest producer) have been woven around the production of cocoa. Indeed, in some places it is not a trace of past times but a commodity showing that colonisation persists in modernised forms, and that cocoa is still harvested in labour conditions bordering on slavery. Cocoa is a raw material that moves millions of euros each year in an export industry whose product is nevertheless mostly manufactured in western countries. In this respect, Theobroma cacao assumes the critical positions of postcolonial discourses.
Other works by Federico Guzmán