Offerings To The Noctural Hours

Offerings to the Nocturnal Hours is the Mexican artist Javier Barrios’ first solo exhibition in Europe which includes a selection of drawings, watercolours, oil paintings, and sculptures. The unique anatomy of the orchid allows it to use pollinators from a wider range of insects than any other plant, resulting in an endless possibility of hybridizations. It is of little surprise then that Javier Barrios has adopted this particular genus as a fertile ground for his constantly evolving body of works. Offerings to the Nocturnal Hours sees Barrios combine his personal approach to storytelling through drawing with research embracing the spheres of botany, mysticism, geography, colonial narratives, and myths of creation.

The orchid is a ripe element for broaching the subject of botanical colonialism, having been trafficked across the world by imperial powers as early as the 1600s. While particularly sought after, their biology was misunderstood; colonial ideology framed them as beautifully fragile, requiring protection and appreciation supposedly lacking in their native lands. Their frenetic extraction (known as orchid fever) led paradoxically to the damage of landscapes and ecosystems where the plants had thrived.
In his drawings belonging to the ongoing series “Buddhist Visions from Hell” created using pastel and watercolour, Barrios revisits the illustrated plates of botanical study books, yet through an anthropomorphic twist, stages the orchids as sentient beings and reinstates their agency.
His hallucinatory and unsettling scenes emerge from a background of influences straddling Japanese Ukiyo-é drawings, Hokusai’s “Hyaku monogatari” (One Hundred Ghost Stories), demons and goblins drawn by Kawanabe Kyosai, and flame-laden 12th-century Buddhist “Jigoku Zoshi” hell scrolls. Folding in an admiration borne in childhood for the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco’s take on social realism, the drawings depicting several endangered orchid species from his native Mexico act as a parable on colonial botany and extractivism where historical references are sampled, displaced, crossbred.

A second series of drawings and watercolours on paper, “Danza de Huichilobos”, is influenced by personal readings of Mexican conquest chronicles, and sees the artist dress and adorn these new iterations of his orchids with elements that refer to iconographies of pre-Hispanic Mexico. Flint and obsidian knives or tecpatl— used in Aztec rituals and as key elements in origin stories—appear alongside creatures presenting their red, skinless skulls, recalling flaying practices.
Habitually drawing at night time, Barrios surrenders to the orchid-induced delirium, channelling onto paper a carnival of oneiric creatures and cosmic shark-like monsters, bedecked in masks, headdresses, beads, and feathers.

This fascination for hybridization and evolutionary theories unfurls in Barrios’ new oil paintings. The flayed skulls once again appear, with beehives or chrysalis grafted onto their heads in a symbolic gesture towards time passing and transformation. Jade green stone—related to the divine in Aztec cultures—is repurposed as prayer beads in the form of miniature skulls. Barrios draws parallels between syncretic religious practices and the hybridisation of families from the animal kingdom.