THE MANCARITA

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The story of La Mancarita resembles the place where it arose. His appearance is what words take
when they are heard again, either because they bounce off the mountain and become an echo, or because
whoever hears them transforms them into myth. In part the sound of the mountain is its cause; sometimes it looks like a
wail, a continuous scream interrupted by barking dogs. Getting lost is easy when between the
kills a cry is heard. Some never return, mostly men, confused in the mountains when they hear it
they get caught between sticks and litter. Sometimes instead, it is women who listen to her,
then they distrust and murmur. Envy is its other cause. Condemned by gossip the hand Rita
was banished.
Those who return say that it scares, that it has a single breast and hairs as long as branches.
As places, things and words resemble each other, La Mancarita resembles the landscape
Andean; to the curvature of a leaf and a branch, the color of blackberry brandy and the line that
gets tangled in paint. Here the story and the images have in common the way in which they mutually
adapt; from the verbal surface to the vision behind it, from proposition to
the image in the logical space that gives it meaning, from the linear recitation of the text to the forms that
they control your order. 1 From the appearance of the myth to the surface of the paintings and from there to the
place that things occupy. In this exhibition the Mancarita appears through visual echoes and
verbal
La Mancarita appears in the voice of that woman who shares with her grandson the story that the mountain range
shared with her. Go back, be back, go back, go again. A while ago a woman wrote that
painting is linked with other sister crafts. The facades of the houses in Boyacá, the body
schematic of a Muisca frog and blackberry schnapps share a similar technology of
visualization, technology understood not only as a way of doing, but of thinking, understanding and
operate 2. In this exhibition the common fibers of visual and verbal culture are tensed, intertwined and
they tighten again until they knot on themselves. Not only as a way of appearing, also of
make and paint.

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Isabel Cristina Diaz
Bogotá, October 19, 2020.