In a remote time, the gods populated the world. When they moved away to inhabit their divine dwellings on the highest peaks, in the celestial heights and the terrestrial depths, or in an eternal dimension in which human time is suspended, the people built bridges that narrowed the gap between the two worlds: the sacred and the human. Just as the rites manage to break the space-time border between both spheres, creating in their performativity a new time in which the sacred is manifested, there have also been objects intoxicated with divine substance, which have been the seat of creative and destructive cosmic forces, in which spirits dwell and which have hosted the ancestors with their benign protective forces. Rocks, altars, carved images, intimate rooms, symbols: rooms where the sacred is manifested, in which the gods have taken their seats and from which they make themselves heard.

Habitáculos, the present exhibition by Damián Lescas, invites us to reflect from the senses on the contemporary relationship with the sacred, in a world where the divine was expelled. With a deep love for medieval and theological wisdom, Lescas approaches the lives of the saints, the expressive power of the icon, and the artistic tradition of the altarpiece. It recovers the expressive power that Christianity found in the image and presents scenes of juxtaposed passions that oscillate between ascetic recollection and worldly temptations. Saint Jerome presents himself as an exemplary scholar who, through humanistic work, in a studio, dedicates his most dedicated efforts to divine knowledge. Lettered knowledge logically and rationally is opposed to the mystical and providential experience of the dream. Since ancient times, dream images have been considered privileged territory for the gods to reveal to mortals the mysteries of the past, present, and future. The ecstatic experience of the fortune tellers finds its parallel in dreams: the moment when the gods speak and express in cryptic words the secrets of human development.

From some time ago, in Lescas' career, his reading and revaluation of ancient Greek culture are evident and admirable. I boldly affirm that notably, the multiple mystery religions have been the ones that he has privileged as an influence for his work since how he evokes this ancient world is not classically but through archaic motifs such as the combat between the hero and the beast, ritual pottery, magic and mantic. The living amphoras that populate canvases and carvings bring to mind the importance of the senses for Greek mysticism. The sacred force is experienced in the flesh, is born from the flesh, and overflows the logocentric rational limits. Lescas's work speaks from the bowels, from the dance movement, from the line and the gesture; creative oceans that bring us to the awareness that the body is the territory par excellence of the sacred.

The room that stars in the exhibition is the body, physical and cultural. Because beyond an immediate vision of the body, Lescas transfigures the rituals of daily life into sacredness. The banquet, the party, and the communion with loved ones are times and spaces that synthesize millenary cultural processes and that burst into daily life with the power to transform reality. Joyful mysteries that are eaten, drunk, watched, and lived. The Lescas exhibition is an exhortation to value the artistic dimension of life and allow ourselves to be seduced by the sacred force of the body that speaks through art.

Abraham Villavicencio