Portal del Aire (2024), installed next to the brutalist-looking Auditorio San Pedro in San Pedro Garza García, N.L., Mexico. Executed in aluminum, the sculpture appears as a blow of the wind suddenly made visible. Perhaps that summer wind that comes to the city with twilight? Portal del Aire, like many of Huacuja’s works, is full of movement resulting from a combination of the composition (the gust of the wind is oriented upwards, with a noticeable incline) and its form, consisting of swirls and curves. The movement deceives the viewer, making the sculpture appear lightweight despite its size. The polished aluminum surface contributes to the lightweight feel of the sculpture as well. It is important to note here that the use of aluminum is a new medium for the artist.
The use of aluminum sets Portal del Aire and Nexarion aside from the rest of the artist’s works, marking what seems like the next step emerging in his artistic process. This material has put the artist into a new and yet more familiar, local context. On the one hand, aluminum added a spatial locality to Huacuja’s works. Working in a city known for its industrial production, the artist chooses a material used so widely in manufacturing facilities spread all over the city he occupies. It also adds temporal locality: aluminum is truly the material not only of this city but also material of this moment. Extremely rare before, reaching a price higher than gold just 100 years ago, aluminum has become one of the most used materials in today’s production. At the same time, the shift to aluminum in Huacuja’s work shows the artist’s dedication to his expansion into bigger volumes of spaces, as well as the wider spans of time due to the durability of the material.
Talking about Huacuja’s work, his portals, and other spiritual interfaces, it is appropriate to use the notion first introduced by Hans Sedlmeier, the concept of dichte. Translated as density from German, dichte attempts to measure the capacity of the artwork to contain a multitude of non-accidental meanings, or, relative to the artist, their skill to guide the viewer through the meanings of the work. The concept seems applicable to Huacuja’s work, as it unites all his spiritual interfaces, from portals to altars and magical ingrown devices as exercises in approaching the ultimately dense world of mystical experiences. Each swirl of the texture and each gust of the wind depicted in those portals promises an unexpected result upon interacting with them. In Huacuja’s works, the portal becomes the concentration of possibilities, of quantum states ready to be observed and emanate new reality into the viewer. The artist at his current stage, however, pauses right there, right at the film of the portal’s surface.
