Abuelo (Grandfather)

Antonio Pichillá is a Tz`utujil Mayan artist who carries out his work from the basin of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. His practice creates tension between modern abstraction and Mayan textiles, unearthing symbolic forms and geometries that transcend Western canons.
The word “art” does not exist in the Mayan language; the closest term is x`ajaan, meaning “sacred”. Therefore, using ceremonial elements such as textiles joined by knots, Pichillá references shamanistic Mayan practices in which blocks of energy are symbolised through these threads.
Generally speaking, in his work the artist uses the four colours of maize (white, black, yellow and red), a sacred food, as a sign of life representing the beginning of history and Mayan cosmology. In the series Abuelos (Grandfathers) he uses the design of a pair of men’s trousers from the Tz`utujil Mayan ethnic group (located in San Pedro La Laguna, Sololá, in Guatemala), characterised by a pattern of vertical and horizontal black marks on a white background; the pattern is also altered, refashioned and mounted on stretchers. “Grandfather” in Mayan culture is synonymous with wisdom and resistance, and these pieces, which could be defined under the codes of Western culture and aesthetic modernity as Geometric Abstraction, must be thought of from another perspective, inside representations that respond to living pre-Hispanic and Indigenous traditions.

Suset Sánchez Sánchez