Pilar Leciñena at the exhibition «Hacia el futuro» IHCI – MIN 2019

Pilar

One of the special guests for this exhibition, celebrating the 80th Anniversary of IHCI, is Maria Pilar Leciñena Monguilod, one of Honduras’ contemporary artists whose work undoubtedly featured and redefined the way of contemporary art in our country. Pilar Leciñena has made history by becoming the first Female Artist in winning the “Premio Único» at IHCI Biennial of Art in both categories: Painting, in the year 2002; with the magnificent work “Sin voz ni Voto”… and Sculpture, in 2015, with the Groundbraking sculpture “Dibujo en Huelga” after more than 40 years of male dominion in the history of this important Art event in our country.

Painting and Video Art are the disciplines Pilar chooses to present in this special occasion.

From 2016, we can find one of the works that the artist has chosen for this commemoration. We’re talking about “Escudo y Letra, Águila o Sol” from the series: Cruce de Tren. A painting using a special format with its distinctive technique for this series: Oil and Charcoal over a raw Canvas.

Cruce de Tren is, “a direct metaphor of the fervent migration towards the perpetual American Dream, in which I explore in the most particular way, the alarming experience of child migration” the artist points out. A latent topic that, as we know, underlies the artistic argument: “childhood as a social imperative”.

This work, Pilar declares, “includes key syntactic theories and characteristics found in my aesthetic argumentation, where I propose picturesque divergent resolutions that, not antagonistically, verse from the naked charcoal line to the abrupt stain of oil over the naked canvas.”

Escudo o Letra, Águila o Sol is, “a vision of this crossroad, like coins into the wind. From Honduras to Mexico, and in Mexico you find it: El…Cruce de Tren.”

From 2018 we contemplate another work; “En busca del paraíso perdido” of the series: Migrantes, a videoart with a duration of 5:05 minutes. It rushes the same thematic of urgent news, the particular fervent migration towards the American Dream, through the union of a suggestive and visually poetic language. We find at the end of the video, amongst others, one of the main elements in this particular artist arsenal: the impression of a stamp, something very distinctive in Leciñena´s work.

Day by day, where, universally it has become difficult to approach the concepts of Nation, Transnationality, and Identity, “I’ve dabbled in the phenomena of Identity Diaspora as part of the follow-up of my personal artistic proposition, and I maintain an argument that, by a personal nomadic spirit, essentially denies the notion of territorial borders and frontiers of all types. The reality of “Now”, generates the perfect stage to formulate an artistic argument about the thematics of Other, Otherness, and Transculturality.

This videoart forms part of my proposition to explore the concept of Space, both physical and conceptual, to reach an analytical approximation of the essential identity of the human collective.

This work equally englobes key syntactic theories which are distinctive to my aesthetic argumentation where, this time, join “symbolically” in a way of a particular tribute to the last thematic addressed by the maestro Ezequiel Padilla Ayestas in his exhibition “El Sueño Americano”. A symbolic presence of the distinctive “Endless Cube” painted by Ayestas makes way for that desolate occurrence, without trinkets of a stripped and disturbing journey. This uncertain striding reflected in the snail (with its characteristic burden) with which I’ve wanted to conceptually reflect this journey in a pseudo poetic way; leaving a Past, finding a Future of an unconscious Now, in which we cannot stray past.This journey WILL BE CONTINUED, just how it is reflected with the stamp… at the end of the video”

Migration will continue, the search for that lost paradise “it is not only an internal battle now which we lead in the experiential way of all human beings; and it’s that, in these present times which we live in, we are inexorably part, one way or another, of the strong beating of humanity’s universal heart.”

«Certified Mail, First Notice»

by María Pilar Leciñena

“The Traditional Mail Service, far from being obsolete, is considered an element of cultural heritage still in present use, thanks be to God. A valuable and essential entity in the heartbeat of a country.” With this brief but certainly resounding declaration, Pilar Leciñena manifests respect and admiration for this universal institution – “without borders institution,” as she would say.  Her love for our Post Service, and, thus, her love for Honduras, is quite simply the essential premise of this exhibition; here is an appropriate time and space for the artist to invite us through her own poetic, to value the heritage of our National Post Service. In this day and age, the vast majority of us enjoy and, yet somehow at the same time suffer, personal connection mediated by pixels and electronic digital devices, applications designed to facilitate the expression of images and ideas through forms of mass communication that we define under the phrase: «Social networks». The aforementioned are so ingrained in our daily lives that they are defining, globalizing and diminishing our language, our way of expressing emotions and in short, our way of getting closer to other human beings. This, perhaps, will be our age’s most remarkable human and spiritual Achilles’ heel. «The human value of a letter walked to and cared for by the Post Service, is much more than the aesthetic enjoyment that the one entailed upon reception of the physical letter. The fusion of the tangible with the intangible takes place in the Post Office, «states the artist. Pilar, through this exhibition, derives the richness of the ritual that is doubtless intrinsic to the nature of postal mail to a semiotic prescriptive process and re-sends us symbols translated into words/ forms and words/ forms presented in artistic signs that, as letters that have been delivered to us, we will read and enjoy in this exquisite exhibition project: «Certified Mail, First Notice»

This is an aesthetic, refined discourse wherein the ethereal metaphorical essence that we find in this magnificent multidisciplinary exhibition invites us to enjoy the lyrical connotation of images, complemented by the poetic use of words and suggestive use of forms, which, as usual in her work, we also find in the media themselves, since they are an essential part of these expressive forms. All of this invites us to explore and value our Post Office. Most definitely, through her work of rescuing fundamental forms and concepts inspired by the stimulating visual splendor of the postal system, Pilar has created an aesthetic ensemble deciphering and interpreting, and thus managing to preserve the ritual beauty of the Post Office. This urges us, as she suggests, to ourselves take on the commitment to preserve and maintain the soul of our Post Office as a functional piece of our heritage that together with the thoughts we have written in those letters, leave testimonies that continue to construct our history. With «Certified Mail, First Notice» this extraordinary and complete artist invites us to enter into the tangible and intangible essence of our Post Service, open to feel the spirit of that ritual – thoughtful words, carefully-wrapped emotions… weighed and sealed together with those: «Guardians … travelling fragments … valuable traces of the culture and history of a country», as Pilar refers to the postage stamps of our beloved Honduras.

Let us value our Cultural Heritage, as we value our National Post Office.