El Lenguaje de los Sentidos | The Language of the Senses

This exhibition brings into focus the coherence and consistency of Oswaldo Maciá’s practice over one-and-a-half decades, revealing some of his technical and intellectual inner workings. He confronts our damaged relationship with nature; he reconsiders the nature of migration and extraction; he questions consciousness and ignorance to build new knowledge. Maciá’s work invites us to move outside our comfort zone, engaging senses beyond the sight we usually depend on in the gallery. He engages our vision, of course, but he also seeks to engage our other senses, in particular by using sound and smell. In doing so he highlights the flaws in our perception when we prioritise vision; we need additional sensory engagement if we want to dig deeper.

The olfactory-acoustic sculpture Under the Horizon (2011-19) lures us in with its playfulness and incongruity. It deliberately upsets our usual systems of perception to force us to perceive anew. The bathtub is at eye level; it’s overflowing, blackly, and there is a watery sound that gradually exposes itself as rain and whirring sewing machines; and it smells… of carrots! What on earth is going on? Our vision fails us. Even our understanding of the horizon has limitations. We can navigate and orient ourselves using its line, but only the sun, whose yellow and orange hues are present here in the carrot’s carotenoids (a chromatography of scent), can travel around it.

Another olfactory sculpture, Corruption and Consciousness (2022-25), invites us to focus on the nature of consciousness. Smell is the only sense that directly interacts with our brain, carrying information directly into our limbic system—regions of memory, imagination, mapping and emotion. This work provokes curiosity through its form and use of language, while its odour opens up personal space to consider our own consciousness, and the relationship between a beautiful scent and the notion of corruption. 

Consciousness of the power of odour helps us into a more meaningful dialogue with New Cartographies of Smell Migration (2021), studies using dynamic perspectives of the globe to chart the extraction of natural resources from the pre-Hispanic world across centuries and continents. We are challenged to reconsider our enjoyment of indigenous Central and South American aromatic commodities like the ‘black gold’ of Peru balsam, and our wilful ignorance of their underlying (his)stories of colonial appropriation. 

The cartographies also speak to another element of Maciá’s ongoing project: engagement with the nature of migration—especially in birds and insects—and the movement of natural forces—especially winds and their traces in ripples on sand and snow. There is drama too in the heroic scale of the monoprints of Arctic flies (2018), sole pollinator of arctic grasses; structural strength visible within in the fragility of the Arctic moths (2018); and beauty and complexity of form in the Ripples (2018). We are unsettled by their beauty, unaccustomed to aestheticizing insects, more used to seeing them as a disgusting pest and failing to understand their beneficial role in ecosystems. 

The revelation of our double standards for the natural world, based partly on the prejudice of vision, is clearest in Maciá’s fresco paintings which deliver movement, volume and profound colour from natural pigments, reaching a crescendo in his paintings of butterflies and birds. These challenge our ability to transcend our visual response; we cannot help but delight in their beauty, and we’d rarely insult them with the name ‘insect’. But just like flies, moths and cockroaches these pretty pollinating creatures are hard-working insect migrants flying thousands of miles across oceans and continents. And while we may prize them at this stage in their metamorphosis, in their larval stages they too are considered destructive pests that must be eliminated to preserve agricultural monocultures’ profits. 

This focus on insect migration also challenges the absurdity of categorisation of species as ‘native’. While many organisms have been introduced by human accident or purpose, many more travel independently. Who, then, is to say who qualifies as ‘native’ and who is the ‘immigrant’, and why should it matter? 

Prelude for an Insect Requiem (2025) further explores the devastating human impact on insect life in a sound composition emanating from delicate handblown glass megaphones. It juxtaposes the astonishing range of insect sounds no longer heard in our near-silent monocultural fields with the sound of shattering glass (our breaking biosphere). Notations|Requiem for the Insects (2025) visualises the acoustic composition bringing new purpose to another eighteenth-century explorer’s instrument, the cyanometer, devised to measure the intensity of blueness in the sky. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was an enthusiastic maker of cyanometers, using them to document his observations from the Canary Islands to Ecuador in the ‘new world’. Maciá adopts the Prussian Blue of his original, reflecting the volume of the insect calls and the degree of breakage in the intensity of colour in the sound waves.

Language is integral to Maciá’s practice. His appropriation of words for his own purposes is based on an obsession with etymology, an enthusiasm for getting to the root of things. Writers are often urged to show, not tell. Perhaps Maciá’s inclusion of the written word in his work breaks the visual artist’s equivalent rule, but he sets his own rules and his notes are not didactic; they provide prompts to help us explore the work—and hence the issues it considers. 

In this exhibition Maciá’s commitment to a constant ‘work in progress’ is revealed as a consistent body of work that is an ongoing means of challenging, involving and providing spaces to reflect and activate consciousness. Skilfully deploying all the media and sensory tools at his disposal he confronts us with what lies beneath the surface, or under the horizon. We are urged to seek out what is hidden in plain sight or deep within our own brains. He lures us in gently with his mastery of technique, his use of colour and his beautiful line but the message is clear and insistent: stop being just a spectator. Listen. Breathe in. Feel. Think. We need all our senses to make sense of the chaos human histories have created, that our planet continues to endure, and that we must fix.

—Jane Levi