Mirada Negra
2024, smoke on paper, variable dimensions.
The project Mirada Negra delves into a speculative and experimental territory, based on our personal experiences with the world of plants. This project seeks to build a bridge between Western scientific knowledge and ancestral wisdom, exploring popular practices that result from the cultural synthesis between indigenous traditions and imported influences, especially due to Spanish colonization.
As a starting point, Espinoza immerses himself in the sensitivity of the plants that inhabit homes, drawing on personal experiences related to popular beliefs about plant life. This occurred during a challenging period in the artist’s life, when much of his garden began to dry up without any logical explanation. This situation generated various interpretations about the cause of the wilting, some coming from family and friends of Espinoza, who attributed the problem to the malevolence known as “evil eye.” These explanations are often used to justify negative events that lack a conventional scientific explanation.
The belief in the “evil eye,” present in various cultures, holds that certain people can cause harm with their gaze, even affecting plants, symbolically connected to the energies of their environment. Although lacking scientific backing, many people claim to experience its effects and resort to cleansing rituals, such as the use of smoke from purifying herbs, to alleviate its impact.
Based on these ideas, the artist created a series of graphic works with smoke on paper, initially from photographs of dried plants from his garden. Subsequently, he focused the project on the symbolic relationship between dried plants and death, exploring images of withered flowers in cemeteries, where floral offerings reflect the memory of the deceased. These flowers, as they wither, evoke a complex narrative between remembrance and oblivion, representing everything from emotional distancing to the acceptance of loss or the gradual fading of memory.
Born in 1972, Chile. Visual artist and academic at the School of Arts UC Chile. He holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain.
He has exhibited in various art galleries in Latin America, including the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Valdivia, and the Municipal Museum of Modern Art in Cuenca, Ecuador, among other institutional spaces.
