The story goes that Zipacna, a demon, is challenged by Hunahpu and Ixbalanque, the two divine hero twins, who decide to exact revenge upon him for the death of the Four Hundred Boys, a group of 400 patron deities of alcohol who had previously tried to kill him after considering his overwhelming strength an aberration. In a fascinating account that deals with arrogance, revenge, fear, and the creation of the universe, Zipacna is finally killed through a scheme in which an elaborate fake crab –his favorite food– is constructed and hid it deep in a canyon. This has raised multiple interpretations, including that of death as punishment for sexual desire.

Zipacna, Creator of Mountains, a collaboration between Proyectos Ultravioleta (Guatemala City) and Galerie Sultana (Paris), brings togetherthe work of two of the most interesting young Latin American artists working today: Federico Herrero, renowned painter and sculptor from Costa Rica, and Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, multi-disciplinary artists from Guatemala. The exhibition revolves around a piece of fan fiction by Ramírez-Figueroa in which the artist introduces himself into a version of Zipacna’s Popol Vuh tragedy that works as both an homage and mockery of the mythical anti-hero.

The work of both artists, from clearly different perspectives yet profoundly in tune, provides a setting of sorts for the literary meta construction created by Ramirez-Figueroa in the eponymous tale. Federico Herrero’s paintings are speculative interpretations of the beach where Zipacna was basking when disturbed by the Four Hundred Boys, the hole where they tried to bury him and the canyon where he is finally caught by Hunahpu and

Ixbalanque as well as of different characters in and out of the story. The works also hold one of Herrero’s recurring elements: the portals to other dimensions as conveyed by the plain fields of color on the canvases, in this case, perhaps a door to the dimension of the Popol Vuh and in particular the moment where Zipacna’s story (and Naufus’ reinterpretation) might take place. Herrero’s construal of a possible Guatemalan landscape has a precedent in his 2011 exhibition at Proyectos Ultravioleta, Catarata.

On the other hand, Ramírez-Figueroa’s series of silk-screen prints are based on automatic drawings inspired by Zipacna’s story and, by a long historical extrapolation, also a commentary on the current state of indigenous communities in Guatemala, particularly in the light of recent political events such as the contested genocide that took place partly where the Popol Vuh was written in the early 1980s. Drawing from a long art historical tradition, these prints also refer to the artist’s concern with a contemporary indigenous identity and it’s unapproachability by non-members of the community.

When Zipacna goes down the canyon to fetch the crab guided by either hunger or sexual appetite according to contrasting interpretations, the Hunahpu and Ixbalanque collapse a mountain over him suggesting the vengeance of his own creations and an association with Cabrakan (Earthquake), the destructor of mountains, his brother. Following the unwrapping of the story, two sculptures and an audio piece by Ramírez-Figueroa round up the exhibition: the arm of Cabrakan who was killed after eating a poisoned bird, and a monkey head, an allusion to Guatemala’s more recent traditional artistic practices.

Zipacna, Creator of Mountains is an excursion into the Popol Vuh, imaginary landscapes, and some of the myths around history, indigenous identity and art production. Through remarkable coincidences in terms of subject matter and artistic sensibility, although through different techniques and forms, both Herrero and Ramírez-Figueroa provide glimpses into a dark yet fascinating version of the creation of the mountains, the beginning of the universe.

Federico Herrero (1978, Lives and works in San Jose, Costa Rica) is an artist who makes paintings wich in the space often extend beyond

the canvas and play with the notion of perception of time and space. Recent exhibitions include : Letras y numeros at Galeria Luisa Strina; Novo

Museo Tropical, Teoretica San Jose ; Aloha amigo, 21st Century art Museum of Kanazawa;» Panamericana, Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, 2010, Bienal

de Pontecedra 2010; and Do it, catalogue and touring exhibition. He also has shown at Venice Bienale 2001, Urgent Painting at Musée d’art moderne

de la Ville de Paris 2002; La Habana Bienale 2003; Empty Garden at the Watari Museum Tokyo 2004; Moscow Biennale 2006; Singapore Biennale 2006,

Venice Bienale 2008, Passengers at Wattis Institute San Francisco 2008; Segunda Trienal Poligrafica del Caribe Puerto Rico 2009 and Panorama 33 at

the Museo de Arte Moderno de Sao Paulo MAM in 2013. Herrero is also founder of Des Pacio, a space for contemporary art located in San Jose Costa

Rica that has been supporting local artists and activating the contemporary arts scene in central America since 2007.

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa (Guatemala City, 1978) holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of

Chicago. The Guatemalan civil war (1960-96) is a recurring subject in his work, which although often softened by an absurd and humorous approach,

fails to conceal the force of history that precedes it. Ramírez-Figueroa has participated in various solo and group exhibitions including the 53rd

Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (Oberhausen, Germany), Home Works IV (Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon), AA Bronson’s School for Young

Shamans (John Connelly Presents, NY), Illy Present Future 2013 (Castello di Rivoli, Italy) and has presented solo projects at Proyectos Ultravioleta

(Guatemala City) and Casa América (Madrid). He is a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Franklin Furnace award, and an Akademie Schloss

Solitude fellowship (selected by Dan Graham). Future projects include a commission to present a mayor sculptural installation at the 10th Gwangju

Biennale in the fall of 2014. Ramirez-Figueroa lives and works in Guatemala City, Guatemala, but is currently a resident at the Jan Van Eyck Academie

in Holland.

Simply placed against one of the gallery walls, the work Klein Bottle for Blowgun (after Lévi Strauss) now known as Three Loops for a Fourth Dimension consists of a steel structure covered in resin, sand and pigments which give the work a clay-like appearance that accentuates some artificial creepers added following the work’s time at the Jardin des Plantes (Fiac 2011). Made up of three continuous loops, the work derives its origins from the figure of a Klein bottle that appeared in La Potière Jalouse (1985) by Claude Lévi-Strauss in which anthropology appropriates this most singular shape with the view to illustrating the structuration of certain South American myths, translating the continuity of spatial, internal and external functions of the body. Alongside, Mètis & Metiista, a previously unseen series of five transparent misshapen then blown glass borosilicate sculptures are displayed , inspired by the variation of Klein bottles made by the British scientist and glass-blower Alan Bennett that were exhibited at the London Science Museum. Described for the first time in 1882 by the German mathematician Felix Klein and closely linked to the Möbius strip, the Klein bottle shows in topology (1) one single closed borderless and non-orientable surface: the inside becomes the exterior and vice-versa, in this way seeming to integrate a fourth dimension, passing through itself.

Between improbable alembics for distillation and anthropo-zoomorphic artefacts of an unidentified civilisation, these pieces of glass display the most transparent of syncretism, reuniting the topological form of the Klein bottle, its representation in three dimensional space experimented by Alan Bennett and the analogy effectuated by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his study. They summon a body of representational fields (and of appropriations) ranging from alchemy to mathematics passing via anthropology and even – not without a touch of humour – modern abstract sculpture (Max Bill, Henry Moore).

By some cunning trick (mètis in ancient greek), the artisan’s know-how called upon by the artist (metiista in Esperanto) literally gives form to these objects embodying metamorphosis, as much through the contortion of materials to behold as in regard to their fabrication process, implicating diverse manipulations and transformations.

Evoking some bicephalous “topsy turvy” creature like the figure of the Trickster theorised by the anthropologist Paul Radin, and prolonging notions of reversibility and infinity to the work with the Klein bottle surface, Mishigamaw (Trickster), a floating piece of salvaged wood and grafted with “teeth” of native copper suggests the passage of time and its effects on the material, which – according to an upside down entropy movement- recovers its original state, hence operating like a sort of temporal loop.

Mixing nature and artifice, science and fiction, upside down and right side up, Bettina Samson’s works presented in this exhibition reflect an ambivalence, even a paradox and only this ambivalence could illustrate the photograph Night Blooming Cereus an image scanned from the cover photo reproduced on an issue of «The Desert Magazine» dating from 1940 of a Cereus greggli flower in bloom. Or how, via a technical procedure implicating light, can you immortalise the flower of a desert botanical (cactus) flower species that opens at night, one single and unique time per year before closing up again to die.

Anne-Lou Vincente

Pursuing the dialogue that links him from his beginnings with the writers (Beckett, Deville, Jauffret, Delaume, Steiner, etc), Emmanuel Lagarrigue’ exhibition proposes challenging sculptural and installation work. Searching to explore what physical impact a text can have as much on a material as on the spectator, he translates it and encodes it as well as our perceptions. Using the specific plasticity of Bessette’s tongue, Lagarrigue makes it eat away at the foundations of our imagination. In this way the spectator shifts around in the weakened underbody of language, to the rhythm of the text itself.

In a sculptural approach that combines natural materials (oak, stone) and light with a clever offscreen game, Emmanuel Lagarrigue delivers an installation of apparent simplicity, of misleading calm. Called upon to wander in a landscape of cut forms, the spectator simultaneously circulates in the space of the language and in the space of their own experience.

The six oak beams are carved with six extracts from Happiness of the night” by Hélène Bessette translated into Morse code. Each beam proposes a “quatrain” in which each line corresponds with one of its sides. Two of these phrases are extracts from this body of work and give rise to two light pieces: one, in the stock room is made up of nothing but a lighting device and turns off an existing light source that is plugged in above. The other above the entry is an absolutely minimal sculpture. The very slow rhythm of their flashing makes understanding the Morse code of the text almost impossible (you need a few minutes to make out the very short phrase that makes up the title). Finally, An Hysterical Attempt is the sketch of a wall constructed with bricks to be fabricated to replace the usual gravel used in concrete by pieces of oak that came from the carving of the oak beams.