Warimahi akataju (Árbol de ceiba visto de costado) [Ceiba tree seen from the side]

Warimahi akataju (Árbol de ceiba visto de costado) [Ceiba tree seen from the side]

  • 2019
  • Acrylic on mulberry paper
  • 70 x 50 cm
  • Cat. D_418
  • Acquired in 2021
By:
Maite Méndez Baiges

The work of the artist Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe refers to the cosmogony of his culture of origin, that of the Yanomami peoples of the Upper Orinoco in Venezuelan Amazonia. In these paintings, we see three plant species painted on vegetable fibre paper, specifically Lanquarelle cotton paper, mulberry paper and cane stucco paper. Knowledge of the support is significant, as the artist began his career with the Mexican Laura Anderson Barbata as an apprentice in the manufacture of paper with vegetable fibres native to the Amazon jungle. Sheranawe paints the figures of several plants on these vegetable supports: a ceiba tree, a prukunama, and the three sweet fruits of the jungle or wakari. The original titles are in one of the Yanomami languages. As is usual in his work, he uses a very restricted palette of flat colours, often limited to reds and blacks (the tones applied by the Yanomami to bodily ornamentation in community celebrations) in combination with the natural colour of the paper. In all three cases, the support has an equivalent value to what is represented, since the surface left unpainted by the artist occupies a large space in all of them, allowing the paper to become a participant in the composition and exhibit its own natural qualities. Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe’s brushstrokes are clear and firm, endowing his paintings with elegance and delicacy. His compositions are figurative but remote from western naturalism, and his synthetic purpose gives his images a schematic appearance close to abstraction. For example, the profile of the ceiba in black is a highly successful synthesis of some of the most characteristic features of this tree, such as the thorns on the trunk, its horizontal top and its large tubular roots.

The art of Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe is always the result of work centred on his environment, that of the Yanomami communities of the Amazonian jungle, their traditions, culture and lifestyles, with special attention to their ways of relating to nature. He is inspired by the symbols, ornamental motifs and species that this culture uses in its everyday life: the plants it uses for medicine, magic, food and rituals, or with which it makes dwellings and creates perfumes; the graphic signs used in body painting and basketry, consisting of straight and curved lines, dots and spider’s webs; or the natural and supernatural phenomena present in its everyday mythology.

These three pieces belong to his work Urihi theri, which means “the place of the jungle”. It consists of compositions constructed on the basis of the analysis and knowledge of Yanomami practices of hunting, fishing, sowing and harvesting, inseparable from their forms of spirituality and their mythological tales.

As in the rest of his artistic production, the painter here focuses on and draws inspiration from the Yanomami culture with the aim of preserving memory and making a record of collectively accumulated values and knowledge in a valuable environment under threat from exploitation, deforestation, mining, epidemics and natural disasters. The artist thus manages to transmit this fragile equilibrium and his profound respect for an ecosystem and lifestyle offering an alternative to those imposed by the economic order of globalisation. In Sheroanawe’s works, the vegetation of this region of the Amazon is translated into its most essential and least exotic version, becoming a series of graphic signs rendered with firm outlines and pure colours resonant with a timeless rhythm remote from the linear pressure of time exerted by the western order. Sheroanawe’s art is both a personal interpretation and a vindication of the tradition and identity of his native culture in a bid for mutual understanding between the Amazonian communities and “others”.

Maite Méndez Baiges

 
By:
Maite Méndez Baiges
Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe
Sheroana (Venezuela) 1971

Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe comes from the Yanomami people, and more specifically the community of Pori Pori. He was born in 1971 in Sheroana, by the banks of the Upper Orinoco in the part of the Amazon located in Venezuela. Since the 1990s he has been producing paintings based on a local perspective, focusing on rescuing and preserving the cultural heritage, ancestral traditions and links to nature of the Yanomami. His father taught him to hunt and fish, and his mother taught him the ancestral world view of the Yanomami. He usually paints on hand-crafted paper made from local vegetable fibre using techniques that he learned at the start of his career in the 1990s from Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata. Together, they founded a collective called Yanomami Owëmamotina (‘the Yanomami art of paper-making’), which for more than a decade produced paper for use by the community in note-books, exercise books and cards. The collective also published a couple of books. In 2001 he decided to go it alone, and since then his explorations have led him to produce work intended to record, rescue and conserve the ways of life, links with the local environment, traditions and world-view of his native people. He does this through paintings that show schematic images of local flora and fauna, often inspired by the traditional body paint patterns and basket-work decoration of his community. His work can be seen as a sort of archive of the natural and supernatural worlds of the Yanomami of the Upper Orinoco, and at the same time a revindication and an expression of concern for the survival of their extraordinary natural and cultural ecosystem in the context of a globalised economy. Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe's art, with its linear, schematic style that blends firmness and delicacy, gives examples of a relationship with the environment that are essential for the preservation of his own community and for the whole world.

At the same time, his oeuvre is a living archive and a personal, intimate interpretation of the traditions and identity of his native culture, its tales, its beliefs and its interaction with nature, stemming from a capacity for observation that has been all but lost. He thus succeeds in conveying a rich, sustainable legacy of values and customs, and in imagining ways of living that are beneficial for the health of the plant and could provide alternatives to the devastating effects of globalisation, which his own community is suffering.

In recent years he has taken part in the Berlin Biennale (2019) and the 12th Shanghai Biennial (2018). At the 2019 edition of ARCOmadrid he won the Illy SustainArt Prize. In 2021 he presented a series called Urihi Theri in his first solo exhibition in Europe, at the Kunsthalle Lissabon in Lisbon. He has also taken part in the joint exhibitions 'Amazonia' at the Andalusia Contemporary Art Centre (CAAC) in Seville and 'Uma História Natural das Ruínas' at Pivô in São Paulo. In 2022 his work was displayed in 'ReVision: Art in the Americas' at the Denver Art Museum and the Kunsthalle in Vienna, at the 23rd Biennale of Sidney and at the 59th Venice Biennale with 'The Milk of Dreams', curated by Cecilia Alemani.

His work can also be found in the collections of the Lima Art Museum (MALI), the British Museum in London, the Mexican National Council for Culture and Arts (CONACULTA), the KADIST in San Francisco, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, Columbia College in Chicago and the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (CPPC) in New York, among others.

Maite Méndez Baiges

 
«Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe. Watori», Ana Mas Projects (Barcelona, 2021). «Flowers & Fruit. Banco de España Collection», Banco de España (Madrid, 2022-2023).
Vv.Aa. Sheoranawe Hakihiiwe. Watori, Barcelona, Ana Mas Projects-Bcn, 2021. Vv.Aa. Flores y frutos. Colección Banco de España, Madrid, Banco de España, 2022.