Jaime Moreno Villarreal “A Balm of Light”

The Link between the images of a mummy and a cocoon, symbols of death and birth, is the main theme in this exhibition by Alberto Montaño.

His collages, created from photograms, alternately express the mortification and vivification of someone going through mourning.

After developing while mourning, a mostly painterly body of work, with the progressive juxtaposition of emblematic elements (shoes, tree branches, limbs torn from dolls, covered with lead or bandages…) Alberto Montaño has embarked in a series of works using x-rays of his own body, to which he has added sheet lead and copper and covered the composition with a synthetic resin.

The photograms shown in this exhibit, mark another step in this direction: now, the artist lays his own body over photographic paper and later adding sheet lead to the result.

With this “exposing his body to light” during the photogram process, and exposing his inner self to the viewer, he imbues the work with a myriad of ambivalences. First, the final black and white nature of the photograms, are emblematic of a number of dichotomies… Life and death being the most important in this case.

Photograms invert these shades since wherever the light hits the photographic paper, it turns black. Thus, life and death are inverted or interchanged.

During this process, the artist wraps his body in Latex as a form of “shroud” which gives the final photograms a sense of amniotic liquid as if being in a gestating process.

The double meaning of the mummy and the cocoon, is reinforced when the body, “buried” under latex and later under resin, adopts a fetal position, which is also commonly used in prehistoric burials as a symbol of a “return to the earth” in a virtual re-birth.

The metallic collage used by the artist, suggests spots of pain, prosthesis, wounds… but also epidermis and organs plausibly beating.

Finally, the use of the resin layer adds even more symbolic density. It is well known that resin is used as a sealant in embalming rites. Precisely, the word “Balm” means a kind of resin. The layer with which Montaño cover these works, nourishes this meaning. It closes and seals the piece, as in the embalming process, but this seal is paradoxically transparent, so it doesn’t isolate the viewer from contemplating the “mummy-cocoon”, much to the contrary, it preserves the life-death images for our contemplation.

This preservation translates the main cultural meaning of embalming: the preservation of the body in transit… thus the link between the mummy and the cocoon.

In this way, Alberto Montaño’s mummies signify an embalming moment in his oeuvre, they mitigate the pain of the flesh.

For the viewer they are a discovery of light in in the midst of darkness. While being exposed, these translucent mummies, in the process of giving birth, they find in this 16th century venue, the best place to gestate their rebirth.