(About the exhibition of Carmen Reátegui)
Carmen Reátegui has united two invincible forces in this fight against brutality: the creative, aesthetic sensibility and the indignation of the protest. The exhibition of plastic art is an unadorned vision of the cruel tree-felling that is being committed in Peru and in the woodlands of the planet.
The exile of the tree that Carmen Reátegui shows us is the most perfidious of all exiles: to take away the earth. And there we see the tree without earth. The roots without earth, the desolate roots claiming to the heavens; the artist Carmen Reátegui has shown us, with the strength of her art, the clamor of the amputated, assassinated tree; crying out in vain, with its roots upended. And there lies the bloodied tree, which demands the redemption of the forests. The bloodied tree, an innocent, vegetable Nazarene. And there are the Detentes, a conjunction of exorcisms of the popular faith designed to detain the arbor fury. And Carmen Reátegui has shown us the art as loyal testimony of the nefarious effects of men’s evil and greed and the ineptitude and indifference or complicity of the governments that allow the felling of trees massively and with total impunity.
The tree is a silent life. The tree is a defenseless life. The tree is a generous life. Carmen Reátegui has made us feel this with her art. The tree is intimate, it lives in and by itself, it is a life that meditates. The tree does not have defensive organs, the tree does not have claws, does not have teeth, has no defense or aggression weapons, it is defenseless. The tree lives giving away the oxygen so that we can breathe. The tree is the opposite of the evil person that fills himself with bitterness and throws toxic fumes against the people. The tree, on the contrary, thanks to the function of chlorophyll, a beautifully green substance, breaks down the carbon hydrates of the substance itself and turns them into glucose, sweet sugar, for its energetic consumption to live and exhales oxygen to the outside. It fills itself with sweetness in its inner life and in exchange, it radiates oxygenation for the world’s life. Carmen Reátegui has expressed with her plastic art the horror that the exile of the tree signifies. It is the art that accuses. And at the same time Carmen Reátegui has given us with her art, a lesson in the love for life.
Leopoldo Chiappo