The historian of religions Mircea Eliade said that nothing could have convinced Brancusi that a stone was just a fragment of inert matter. Despite the secularisation of society and the imminent scientific hegemony in the Western world, Eliade warned that human beings were incapable of transcending their religious behaviour and that the best evidence of this could be seen in the work of modern artists.
These, in their view, with the destruction of traditional forms and the fascination with the primordial states of matter, seemed to resist the objectification of the natural world and recreate the cosmic cult of ancestral cultures.
The work of Aldo Chaparro (Lima, 1965) consists of intervening raw materials with elementary techniques; a plastic experimentation that from today's perspective tends to be considered as a merely formal exercise, but that, interpreted symbolically, manifests the fundamental purpose of all religious impulse: to give an intelligible form to the universe. Whether through the carving and burning of wooden columns that evoke totemic figures, the covering of geometric compositions with gold leaf or the simple and forceful act of folding and wrinkling sheets of steel by pressing parts of the body against them, the different pieces that make up this exhibition are an expression of our perpetual longing to enter into communion with something beyond ourselves.
