CATALINA LEÓN: BARCELONA

In November 2023, Catalina León and I ended up spending two weeks in residence together in the small town of San Carlos, Salta, Argentina. We were hosted by the Museo Jallpha Kalchaki as part of a cultural and experimental exchange between contemporary artists and local knowledges and crafts – from pottery to plant medicine. The air is arid in San Carlos – dust covers everything, and it is red, and yellow. Water comes to the town in trucks, and by the end of our trip, the water truck in the main square had none left. A sense of foreboding settled into the town. 

 

As an artist, and as a human being, Catalina bursts with agñipé. It only takes a second to realise. The same abundance, exuberance, dedication to – no: commitment to love holds all of agñipé’s definitions together, as well as the emotional and spatial landscapes Catalina creates through canvas and situation. Reading them, I imagine an adult’s flashy, fuzzy, broken-up memories of childhood summers. Or Catalina’s rooms and canvases, her altars and temples, full of living and lived material. Or again, that gentle high that heralds the beginning of love. In her last definition, as in the rest of the work, we find an invitation: “that lucidity you reach when you give up trying to understand something”. Which is exactly what happens when, wanting to return to the world, we fold back into it, and at that very same moment we come to realise that the deepest possible meaning found in existence is completely immanent, or at the very least completely adherent, to existence itself, births as we birth, unspools as we unspool.

 

You can read Lucia Pietroiusti's text on Catalina León by clicking here.