Noé Martínez claims in Mallorca the legacy of the indigenous American peoples



Noé Martínez was born in Morelia, the capital of Michoacán and one of the cities with the most history in Mexico. At 36 years old, he is one of the most outstanding Mexican artists of his generation. His multidisciplinary work is characterized by the complexity of the ideas that support it, often disturbing, and its powerful poetic and visual impact. Martínez is Huasteca, an indigenous community distantly descended from the Mayans, established in the northern Gulf of Mexico 2,000 years ago, and later conquered by the Aztecs. The Huasteca lived on lands that were not very fertile, so the Spanish colonizers, in search of immediate profits, sold indigenous people from the area as slaves destined for the tobacco and sugar cane plantations of Cuba or Hispaniola.

Martínez investigates the traumatic history of his community in archives and libraries, as well as collecting family memories. With all these materials he builds powerful installations, such as the one he presents in Palma de Mallorca, in a 13th century chapel. What was once the emblematic Oratori of Sant Feliu has been the Spanish headquarters of the Kewenig Gallery since 2017, a benchmark in the Berlin art circuit since 1986. The exhibition El hierro y el tabaco is the result of the collaboration between Kewenig, the residency of creators at the Centro de Arte de Andratx, and Llano, a gallery in Mexico City that shows several artists who develop research projects related to ethnography, science, traditional indigenous knowledge or the history of invisible communities.

The red of the sea. At Kewenig, Martínez has installed five paintings on canvas without a frame. The four colours of the paintings – the one on the altar is double – are red, white, black and yellow, which refer to the four cardinal points but also to the colours of corn, which vary according to the area where it is grown. The Huastecas correspond to the colour red, which for them is the symbolic colour of the sea. Therefore, the red is a double painting, with two meanings.

In the Nahuatl language, the word for the sea also means grandmother and is the place where the gods live. Various garments hang from the paintings, some are clothes worn by the artist and another is a cloth with leaves of ritual plants printed on them. Also hanging from the paintings are necklaces made from bones, which were scraped to create musical trances to connect with ancestors; crystals from old lamps, found in churches or abandoned houses, and which Huastec shamans use in divination and healing rituals; and pages torn from The Dance of the Flyer, a book by the French anthropologist Guy Stresser-Péan, which analyses the meaning of one of the best-known ancestral ceremonies in Mexico, and in which participants hang upside down from a rapidly spinning pole.

On the floor of the gallery, suggesting a chain, these instruments used to mark slaves have been strung together. Everything seems to invoke spirits and ghosts.