Fernando Efren Sandoval
By Bernd Scherer (former director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin)
The images created can be read as the beginning of a visual grammar of the Anthropocene.
Efren Sandoval was confronted with the challenge of doing justice to the diversity of topics in the individual volumes, while at the same time referring to the common frame of reference of the overall Anthropocene project.
The various manifestations of water, as waves, as currents, in the form of drops, guide the viewer through the visual world of the Anthropocene, thus creating a reference system. They are the guide through a world that is coming apart at the seams.
With water, Efren Sandoval initially focuses on the element to which these illustrations owe their existence. These are watercolors in which the water colors penetrate the paper. Water is thus the design element of the Anthropocene worlds of imagination that you encounter in these images, but water is also the element that fundamentally defines human life and planet Earth.
It is precisely the Anthropocene processes that endanger water as the basis of life: whether through floods and droughts or through the contamination of groundwater as a source of drinking water.
The history of Mexico City, which is of course very familiar to Sandoval, shows how the natural history of water is linked to its cultural history, leading from the pre-Columbian era, through colonization and modernization, to the present day of the Anthropocene.
After all, pre-Columbian Tenotichtitlan was located in a large lake. Floating gardens, the remains of which can still be seen in Xochimilco today, provided food for the urban population. So in the pre-Columbian era, there was a water culture that made water productive in urban life and connected it to the way of life of the indigenous population.
By contrast, the Spanish treated water as the enemy from the outset. It was mainly Castilianos who developed Mexico City. In contrast to the Andalusians, the element of water was completely foreign to them as part of urban architecture. By filling in parts of the lake, the Spaniards destroyed the climatic and ecological balance in the basin of Mexico. This intervention not only caused longer dry periods, but also more frequent flooding. The colonization of the Valley of Mexico was also a colonization of water.
The final burial of the water in the Valley of Mexico occurred in the twentieth century, when the oil industry was nationalized and cheap gasoline led to an explosion in the car market. What was celebrated as a process of modernization meant that the last canals had to give way to streets.
When you consider this cultural history of water in Mexico, it is no coincidence that water has become a fundamental element of Efren Sandoval's watercolors. Sandoval's images of graphic illustrations are initially static as a medium. But the fluidity of water turns the static into a dynamic, process-oriented language. Thus, Sandoval succeeds in developing a language in this medium that makes it possible to experience the drama of the transition processes of the Anthropocene both in the individual images and in the larger context.
Both the representation of the water and the individual pictorial motifs play a fundamental role in this. In the painting “Climate Change”, for example, figures that can be interpreted as flying butterflies, but also as crystals frozen into ice, point to the drama of the situation. At the same time, a giant wave pushes into the picture from the left, with animal heads recognizable in its crest. Are the animals being swallowed up by the wave? Sandoval plays with these ambiguities, drawing the viewer into the image.
In the painting “Land use”, the green, blue and violet colors present us with a sick world. The colors confront the viewer with a nature that has lost all form of naturalness; they are the ruins of a nature that has been completely destroyed by industrial practices. At the same time, in the sense of geoengineering, this nature becomes a laboratory in which the new nature is created by humans through the injection of plants. Here, the total domination and transformation of the earth becomes the design of a dystopian world.
Nevertheless, there are still elements in this world that resist the dystopian development, as can be seen in the painting “Biodiversity”, which takes over color elements from the “land-use” painting, but nevertheless celebrates the diversity of the world, especially of animals. It is the rich and fascinating animal world of Mexico that is not only depicted, but almost shapes the painting.
The animals create the imagery with their bodies. In the process, the concrete form of the animals transitions into abstract pictorial elements. At the bottom right, for example, there is a snake that frames the image at this point. In the center of the image, we encounter a whale that rises from the waves to the sky. The wave it causes flows into the body of a jaguar moving towards the viewer. The butterflies soaring in the sky, with their iridescent yellow and red coloration contrasting with the blue, green and violet basic tones of the pictures, represent a hope for life that perhaps escapes this world.
The bird in the picture “Mining” is reminiscent of figures from the pre-Columbian world. It is a broken figure. It represents a world that has no chance against the brutal destruction of modernity, represented in the picture by gears.
Finally, the picture “Visual Representation” is reminiscent of the means of knowledge that were the basis for the recording, ordering, but also conquering of the world. From the sailing boats that crossed the seas, the paintbrushes with which the “discoveries” of plants and animals were captured in pictures, to the cameras that documented developments. It is an indication of the beginnings of a modern age striving for knowledge, production of which became part of the shaping of the world, a designing process which led the planet to the existential crisis we are in.