Cúmulo

Ash given as nourishment

Around Popocatépetl volcano, two things can always be expected: fumaroles visible under a clear sky, and ash that occasionally covers everything, entering houses and cars. This ash becomes an everyday presence, swept away countless times to prevent it from settling permanently on surfaces. Its inevitable fall is also unpredictable; no one knows how it will accumulate. Yet this unexpected intruder can be given a new form, stabilized on photosensitive paper to produce recognizable images from its particles. This is precisely what Gonzalo García does when he collects volcanic ash to make images from this unstable material.

Gonzalo’s images made with ash are distinctive: hands held out to receive, a pan de muerto, a Coca-Cola bottle. These motifs belong to the everyday life he encountered during his residency at Impronta. Just as ash can potentially be everywhere, the images he makes with it insist on that everyday presence.

Ash results from a potential danger—the volcano’s deadly eruption—but also acts as a natural soil fertilizer. It evokes the unavoidable duality of life and death, and the tension between what changes and what persists. It concerns time and accumulation: an intruder welcomed into the production of images. García’s works therefore ask to be considered as time condensed into images through fragments. Transitory in their material, they acquire stability through the technique that makes them possible. These images are ash offered as an image.

Daniel Montero Fayad