Museum Director Patricia Noriega Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, Quito Ecuador Evaluation of art work for Mercedes Cachago Exhibition: Oil extraction in vulnerable nature - Lofoten, Norway and Yasuni. Ecuador

1. OIL EXTRACTION IN VULNERABLE AREAS: LOFOTEN, NORWAY -
YASUNÍ, ECUADOR
Exhibition by Mercedes Cachago
08.Aug 2019 – 28.Sep.2019
Meeting Mercedes Cachago has been a strong experience for me. Not only because of discovering
her art, but also learning about her life. A life full of high cliffs, deep hollows, and rough challenges that
has been forming her as a woman and as an artist.
Even in her adolescence she shows an inclination for painting. In her poverty she makes cards on
which she paints and glues pieces of paper with the sap of a tree called “lechera”. She was always
close to nature and has maintained this attachment as an adult. She paints what she hears, observes,
and what she feels.
While still quite young, she meets Gonzalo Endara Crow, who teaches her to paint, and who sees in
her a unique talent for the chromatic. She enters the world of magical realism, when the teacher gave
her a book that marked her life forever: One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, a
book she would read by candlelight, due to her limited economical resources. However, the fantasy
world she reads about in the book was quite real also in her own childhood life. Surely for this reason,
her inclination towards this style would remain.
Mercedes establishes herself in Norway in 2001. She continues her chosen avocation. Now she paints
with other perspectives since this new landscape during winter appears immovable, cold, with bare
trees, under a blue sky that never ends. And she feels that he will not really be able to create with the
coldness of the winter that surrounds her. However, she gets the opportunity to work in a kindergarten
and discover in the children an innate joy even in inclement weather. She observes in the children
inherent innocence and warmth. This allows her to find herself again, and with a magic similar to what
she thought she had lost.
And she paints the horizon that surrounds her, with its own innate elements which includes mountains,
houses, horses and symbols of the strange, almost supernatural realism of the Ecuadorian Andes.
And her art, the composition, the handling of colors and form, allows you to make your unrepeatable
creations, incorporating objects and life belonging there, children, snow-filled trees, churches, chimney
pipes that promote this warmth of home
Magical realism
This artistic expression appears in Europe in the 20th century in the visual art and in literature, which
depicts the unreal and the extra as something that belongs as quite the ordinary. The objective is to
surprise and invoke feelings without saying so directly. The German art critique and historian Franz
Roh was the first to use the term in 1925, naming it “Magical Realism', referring to the painting style
known as “The new objectivity” (”Neue Sachlichkeit’), an alternative term for expressionism.
For Roh, the magical realism is anchored in everyday life, but with nuances of fantasy and wonders.
He compares it with surrealism, however, with one particular difference. In magical realism, the objects
are material and have real existence in the world and in the cosmos. The Italian artist Giorgio de
Chirico was considered a pioneer of this style. Towards the end the 1910 decade, he produced works
referred to as 'metaphysical art”.
Amongst the painters of the world featured in this category we find Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, Paul
Cadmus, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Edward Hopper, Marcial Gómez, Felice Casorati, Alex
Colville, John Rogers, Marcela Donoso, Antonio Donghi, Armando Adrián López and in Ecuador,
Gonzalo Endara Crow and Mercedes Cachago.
In the beginning of the 20th century a literary movement with the characteristics of magical realism
also emerges within Latin American literature. The writers Alejo Carpentier or Arturo Uslar-Pietri were

2. strongly influenced by surrealism during their stays in Paris around 1930. However, Jorge Luis Borges
with the Universal History of Infamy is considered one of the pioneers of magical realism, in 1935.
Similarly, for many critics, Gabriel García Márquez is the greatest exponent of magical realism in Latin
America.
Other writers have also explored this fantastic universe, among them Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo,
Isabel Allende and in Ecuador, José de la Cuadra and Demetrio Aguilera Malta.
In her youth Mercedes Cachago, is strongly influenced by two powerful proponents of this style:
Gabriel García Márquez and Gonzalo Endara Crow. She creates real worlds, but intermixed with
symbols from the Andean mythology, uses symbols of birds such as the condor and the hummingbird,
balloons, colored tile roofs, the virgin of the Panecillo in other geographical environments, plants and
ears of corn, horses, colored moons, mountains, snowfalls and rivers, churches, houses, human
beings in everyday scenes, which are lost in the thick fog. All this is implemented with strong, vivid
chromatic, and with elements of fantasy and magic.
This art form will take your spirit to unexpected places. And Mercedes Cachago has had exhibitions in
Ecuador, Norway, the United States, Cuba and Sweden. However, a years ago, she decided to partly
abandon the magical realism to start expressing herself in a new way.
Expressionism and figurativeness
It has been a real challenge for Mercedes to detach herself from the fascinating style of magical
realism; However, she now presents a different direction within the style of arts. It was born as a result
of a dire problem in Ecuador: the disrespect for life in the jungle. This project is called ‘Oil extraction in
areas of vulnerable nature: Lofoten, Norway - Yasuni, Ecuador’.
Through her work, the artist, now with a tendency of expressionism and figurativeness, denounces the
global impacts on climate change; the selfishness and corruption of politicians on duty; the extinction
of species: animals and trees hundreds of years old; the needs of the native peoples of the Amazon;
she also makes a comparison between wealth and poverty and, above all, between political attitudes
towards oil extraction: in Norway, where they take better care of life and conserve oil reserves under
the sea outside Lofoten, while in Ecuador they extract from the jungle without much thought of the
species that are at risk of extinction.
She paints on canvases with oils and acrylics, and tells stories full of surreal concepts, which do not
happen yet but could happen: a child on a collapsed tree, that in his innocence finds happiness in the
leaf of a large tree. and in a drop of water. Nature is the main reason for joy for children, even if it is
being devastated.
She shows barrels of oil, and dollars that bleed due to the exploitation and the destruction generated.
She is using cold and warm colors without fear. Her drawings are determined, unbreakable. The
human figure is purposeful, it is complemented by the loneliness and emptiness that can be the end
result in the jungle, if the human being does not say: “Enough!”
She paints hands that hold a small portion of paradise, the rest is nothingness; However, there is hope
for a flying multicolored bird, still clinging to life. Also, there appear vulnerable Waorani women or girls,
being stalked by mestizo men who exploit the jungle. The animals of the sector cry blood. It also
captures aboriginal hunters who no longer have anything to chase, because everything has been
destroyed. Life goes out slowly for the artist. Her butterflies are attracted to the light that flows from the
burning of oil and hence are consumed in the fire. They seek light, but straight to death.
In this, her new artistic venture, she also intersperses landscapes and elements that represent
Ecuador and Norway: mountains, rivers, eagles, condors, foxes from the north, forests and jungles, as
well as the northern lights. All with the purpose of denouncing and with the desire to awaken the
consciences of the politicians in office.
Mercedes Cachago presents more than 60 paintings in the halls of Eduardo Kingman, Oswaldo
Guayasamín, and Miguel de Santiago at the “Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana” in Quito. It is a much
needed and special occasion – and a wake-up call - to contemplate that our modern life today can
bring death to us all, if there is no conscience.

3. The economic progress of the country should not be based solely on the exploitation of natural
resources, and if it has to done, it should be done with the utmost care and responsibility, because
nature is life, and because one more lung could stop working on this polluted planet.
Mercedes Cachago, Master of the Ecuadorian Art, addresses the frightening and tear-choking stage of
today’s ecological problem. She gives her work the essence of her life and her spirit, and the result is
an apocalyptic story of the Amazon.
Her telling, her art, is full of denunciation and strength. She is not satisfied when looking at what is
happening in her native country, she shouts desperately so that there still may be a hope of survival in
one of the most mega-diverse countries on the planet.
Patricia Noriega Rivera
DIRECTORA DE MUSEOS CCE
(Translated from Spanish by Tor Lokrheim)