LatchKey Gallery is honored to present La Magia Del Pueblo, the second solo exhibition by Luis Álvaro Sahagún with Latchkey Gallery. Luis Sahagún is a multi-disciplinary artist who creates drawings, sculptures, and paintings with a socially engaged art practice transforming art into an act of cultural and spiritual reclamation. La Magia Del Pueblo will be on view from May 10 – June 9, 2024 at LatchKey Gallery located at 173 Henry Street, New York, NY 10002. The artist reception will take place on Friday, May 10 from 6-8PM.
As a practitioner of Curanderismo, a healing practice found in the indigenous cultures of Mexico, Sahagun transforms the gallery to a spiritual experience. This inclusion functions as a healing of oppressed identity, through histories of generational trauma, and finding ways to decolonize the self.
Newly produced paintings explore the spirit nagual, a mystical guardian and guiding force deeply rooted in indigenous traditions and shamanic beliefs. The choice to portray a complex spiritual aspect of the self in a physical medium identifies and represents the complexity of the human condition, as well as embodying the layered presence of this aspect of ancient traditions.
A large part in many of Sahagún’s paintings is Paulo Santo, burnt in ancient practices. This ritual, traditionally not preservational in nature, is reoriented by the ability to transfer it onto canvas. This transcends the physical ephemerality of burning it, into something completely permanent. Using this medium falls out of the typical art practice, and brings the viewer into the ritual, pushing the boundaries of possibility for the piece. Through these emotional works, Sahagún preserves a practice, literally, and amplifies its permanence, despite the historical erasure of ancient practices and ideas. The Chuyel, sacred soul energies, stay pressed onto the work, in ways impossible in the practice itself.
Portraits of members of his community celebrate their personhood, surrounding the subjects with contemporary artifacts of Mexico, as well as indigenous influences. This artistic practice is combined with the spiritual, as every subject is treated by Sahagún while being drawn.
Woven throughout La Magia Del Pueblo, is a sense of resistance, not in portraying pain, but in the beauty of indigenous identity and spirituality. Melding together the practice of healing, with the practice of creating, the pieces are a product of culture, as well as the inner self.
