Antonio Pichillá | Geometría Intercultural
Luciana Brito Galeria is presenting Geometría Intercultural, Guatemalan artist Antonio Pichillá’s first solo exhibition in Brazil. Held in the gallery’s Pavilion, the exhibition brings together works that synthesize more than two decades of research structured around the notion of “intercultural geometry” – a field of thought in which tradition, ancestral memory, and abstract language intertwine as forms of knowledge, identity, and belonging. The accompanying critical text is by Chilean curator and researcher Alexia Tala.
Antonio Pichillá – Geometría Intercultural
Opening: March 28
On view through: May 2
Critical text: Alexia Tala
The exhibition’s title, which means intercultural geometry, can be understood as referring to a symbolic field in which geometric forms, patterns, and structures mediate between different systems of knowledge. Here, geometry is understood not as a neutral or universal language, but as a cultural practice shaped by cosmologies, memories, and ways of inhabiting the world.
For more than two decades, this concept has guided Antonio Pichillá’s artistic practice. An Indigenous artist of Tz’utujil Maya origin, he works with textile art and ancestral weaving techniques – forms of knowledge passed down through generations and charged with symbolism tied to spirituality, territory, and the traditions of his community in San Pedro La Laguna, on the shores of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala.
The exhibition Geometría Intercultural moves through different series and moments in Antonio Pichillá’s oeuvre, opening up a field of reflection on abstraction and spirituality as forms of knowledge, as well as on the possibilities of an archaeology of the present.
A highlight of the show is the installation Arqueologia Contemporânea (2025), which evokes ancestral legacy and wisdom through stones and textiles. Considered sacred, the stones were taken from the mountains and from Lake Atitlán and subjected to a fire ritual that imbues them with joy and ancestral memory. Similarly, the figures of the abuelos and abuelas (grandfathers and grandmothers) play a central role in the artist’s work, pointing not only to ancestry but also to memory and the transmission of knowledge. In works such as La Confradía, Abuelas y Abuelos (2025), Abuela materna (2025), and Abuela (2024), for example, Antonio Pichillá uses fabrics, threads, objects, and structures that allude to traditional Tz’utujil weaving practices and dress, while subverting supports, patterns, scales, and functions.
In Códice Textil (2023), Antonio Pichillá alludes to the Madrid Codex – a Maya manuscript removed from its cultural context and now held by a Spanish institution. It is a key reference because of the figures, sacred elements, and calendars it depicts, as well as the way it gives visual form to knowledge. “Layout, repetition, rhythm, and accumulation shape a geometric mode of thought in which image, writing, and spirituality are inseparable,” Alexia Tala explains.
In the Nudo series (2017–2019), Antonio Pichillá attaches scraps of traditional textiles to canvases with geometric paintings, bringing fabric and canvas into communion. As Alexia Tala notes, “the irregular formats, trapezoids, and displaced rectangles strain the stability of the pictorial plane and recall Hélio Oiticica’s Metaesquemas, though without establishing a direct lineage.” In her view, “this approach opens up a fertile dialogue with the geometric tradition in Brazilian art, especially with those currents that, since the mid-20th century, have sought to shift abstraction toward the body, space, and experience.”
Antonio Pichillá’s work engages with geometry as an expanded field in which sensory, ethical, and political dimensions intersect. His abstraction does not lay claim to modern universality. Instead, it is grounded in the specificity of a territory and a history marked by colonization, violence, and resistance.
