Leaves Life

Jorge Miño, Argentina | Leaves Life

Solo Show | Contemporary Photography

I am sure that you would be able to sleep in this shack in the middle of the jungle, like the one I lived in the first year on my coffee farm in the mountains of San Luis Potosí… wrote Edward James in one of the letters from the lush correspondence he had with Leonora Carrington.

The choice of the Aztec lands to fulfill the fantasy of a wild free life, without conventions, a little outside from the world perhaps was because it was easier to be a good Englishman outside of England, in the middle of the jungle, as James, his great friend, also British, wrote to him that another of the coincidences he had with Carrington.

To do this, in addition to the essential trip, the poet, sculptor and patron, closely linked to the surrealist movement, built a garden that he provided with delicious sculptures, the wonders of his carvings that constantly refer to Leonora. This was in 1944 on land on the banks of the Santa María River in Xilitla, Huastec territory, northwest of Mexico.

In Jorge Miño's images taken in Las Pozas, Edward James’s garden of Eden, the encounter between surrealism and exuberant nature occurs again. In the beginning, the artist made a real trip to the place to document, as if he were a naturalist, a traveling painter, the leaves and the trees, the sculptures and the branches. He collected information from the many shades of green, the shapes of the flora, volumes and heights that passed through the lens of his camera.

Miño's second trip is imaginary. In some of his images there is the controlled fortuitous encounter between the foliage and some emblematic works by Roberto Aizenberg, an Argentine painter who belonged to the second surrealist movement. The operation, then, is to superimpose eras and traditions, figures and colors, countries and artists. Miño uses his expert eye to see what is between the fronds. Like an adventurer, he challenges the path set and seeks new limits and encounters of opposites in thought. The artifice of assembled and added categories resignifies and projects an operation that could continue and be itself a version of surrealism. It is an appointment and a creative act, at the same time.

Another of the letters from James to Leonora, reads:

Leaves, leaves, leaves in every imaginable form

Leaf form and leaf soul and form spirit

And leaf life shape in love leaf and heart leaf

And blood leaf and brain leaf and leaves

They are like hands and lip shape leaf

Openmouthed listening in the forest of Xilatoyan

Over the ruins of Taziol, the mighty city

The abundant, the variegated, the incommensurable layers of meaning, the references that are covered and discovered adhere to this region, a zone of drift, a journey of discovery, another mantle. 

Miño's reading of these images shakes and revives the ecosystem of artists, texts and works that are in the air. He catalyzes them to evoke them; to transform them into precursors and take their own path.

Laura Isola (fragment)

September, 2023 | ALMANAQUE fotográfica, Mexico City