A Long Night's Journey Into Day

Gildar is pleased to present Filder Augustin Pena in the artist's first solo exhibition in the United States A Long Night’s Journey Into Day. This special presentation opens at Yes Ma’am projects in Denver, Tonight Friday, Sep 6^that 8:00pm (401 S. Alcott) and runs through Sep 12^th. The visionary paintings of Filder Agustín Peña

(b. 1978) straddle visual and material worlds. A self-taught painter and indigenous Shipibo from Pucallpa, Peru, his symbolic works on canvas and fabric combine traditional Shipibo cosmology with a distinct contemporary awareness. Peña’s work centers around an “astral journey” embarked on during nocturnal shamanic sessions marked by encounters with spiritual entities in woodland, celestial and aquatic locations which animate the Shipibo mythology and partner the shaman during ceremonies.

Conceived in a ritual state Peña’s works transmit communal knowledge and symbolism while retaining distinct and highly individual stylistic qualities. Giving tangible expression to an experience that many of its practitioners deem ineffable, the artist employs existing Shipibo iconography expressed through an intuited process. Incorporating inventive compositions and use of materials, Peña has developed a compelling and powerful vocabulary.

Two groups of work on view in this exhibition represent material and stylistic polarities within the artist's thematic practice. The first series of canvases painted in a swirl of fluorescent and earth tones come together to form haptic compositions through contrasting palettes. Traditional keñe patterns, a hallmark of Shipibo textiles and design said to have been brought back to the tribe by Shamans during ayahuasca visions, surround various Shipibo iconographic figures, from the animistic, Anaconda (Ronin), Jaguar (Ino), vegetal (ayahuasca, chakruna, tobacco), terrestrial characters (shaman, curandera, Shipibo laypeople), and anthropomorphized elemental deities such as the earth  (Pachamama) or night sky transformed into a snakelike being. These works find lineage in fellow Peruvian, Pablo Amaringo who founded the Usko-Ayar school of painting in Pucallpa, which largely steers away from academic technique despite a familiarity with it. Peña’s images, while indebted in content, however, leave behind illusory depth for a more direct and graphic flatness dissolving barriers between foreground, background, figure and geometry.

The second group of graphic and muted tonal paintings might better be described in terms of drawing but for their use of a brush. Defined by bold line rather than color, these simplified images are rendered in pigments derived from the very ceremonial plants they depict. Imbued with the essence of their subject matter the large and small works emanate calm, soothing elements of the ceremonial experience as described by Peña in contrast to the bright and pulsing acrylic works transmitting its more active qualities.

Beginning in the night and ending often just before dawn, the traditional Shipibo ayahuasca ceremony can be described as a passage both in time and between states. Various egoic barriers may be encountered and overcome during this period of the earth's rotation as internal psychology surfaces to encounter various plant and spirit guides, with the shaman as the interfacing agent. Peña's evocative paintings offer entree into such a distinct vantage point, of an artist uniquely positioned as a link between frontiers unsee and visible, between night and day.

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Filder Agustín Peña (1979-2020) lived and worked between Yarinacocha and Taray, Peru. His works have been exhibited at the Museo de la Nación in Lima (2007, 2017), and the museum of the convent Qoricancha in Cusco (2008 and 2018).