Artist statement

[Translation] “Four spruce trees are rooted and sprout from the body of an androgynous being, which floats and rises above a wavy emerald-green line of mountains. A caribou walks to the east, and a wolf darts across the middle of the landscape. The wolf and androgen forms intermingle. Overhead, a star shines. Below, a blue serpentine line marks the boundaries of this “territory” …Today, as we were paddling along the shoreline, I saw a grizzly bear making his way across the side of the Wernecke Mountains, and three Peregrine falcons flew over our raft.”
August 6, 2003: Snake River Journal – Yukon


From early childhood, my journals have been a precious personal possession. Their use has evolved and grown with time; they have matured as they follow my journey to become an instrument for recording my life history/story.

Many of these diaries disappeared due to life circumstances. I confess that I keep one such notebook of my past secured in a locked box! It was started in Buenos Aires, to bear witness to and map out my exile and uprooting from my homeland.

I reverently consult my journals that have come into being in these new Latitudes.
As I seek to decode their enigmatic entries…
I see clearly the words and symbols merge to create sweet or brutal poetry;
I see ideograms on paper, gestated and fed by social contradictions and life itself;
I see the red lines of the androgynous leitmotif representing my human “self” and my personal quest for a higher level of consciousness;
And finally, as I finger through their pages, I see a fragile creature of flesh and blood, fraught with feelings and emotions, on a never-ending journey of reconciliation with Heaven and Earth.

As I search for peace, my own territory and truth, my public artworks have, over the years, evolved to become installations and navigational charts painted out on camouflage textile, a metaphorical depiction of the conquest and militarization of our planet. These spaces and “life maps” combine symbols from fluctuating universal memory, emblems of Western culture and ideograms extracted from my personal Oracles.

Finally, re-enacting an ancient ritual, I turn to Nature and kneel before the Canelo, Cedar, Lengawood and Raulí trees *. I implore them for healing, strips of their woody flesh becoming a part of my cartography as a sacred symbol of my ancestors from the Americas.

José Mansilla-Miranda, November 2007

“Mansilla-Miranda’s art expresses a search for a higher spiritual purpose in life. There is often a dialogue with the animal and plant world with each image presented hieratically on the flat painted surface. This makes his works a kind of cartography of the soul with each symbolic placement within a painting carrying a relative and synergistic weight in relation to the others. We read these painterly images and the living or more arcane elements they reference as a complex and layered form of experiential documentation, at a higher and less objective, above all intense level of expression” (John K. Grande, canadian curator and Montreal-based art critic).

* Canelo = Drimys winteri; Cedro = Thuja plicata; Lenga = Nothofagus pumilio; Raulí = Nothofagus alpina. All are sacred trees of the Aboriginal peoples of the Americas.