Visions huichol, un art amérindien du Mexique

One can easily imagine that this form of art is very ancient, with its roots plunged in some pre-Colombian tradition. Actually, the paintings made with thread by the Huichol Indians in Mexico – a community of nearly fifty thousand persons - are not even one hundred years old. They appeared in 1953 in an artisan fair at the bus station in Guadalajara! Certain major works, collected early on by Western museums, already used synthetic string, which proves they belong to the XXth century. The author has a long experience of Indians (he also lived with the Wayuu of the Guajira, between Colombia and Venezuela), decrypts the material procedure (spreading on a plywood board a layer of wax in which the strings are dipped) but above all the symbol of this very ritual art form. In it there are Gods, chamanes, animals (colibri, eagle or rattler) and local vegetables (peyotl and various solanacea, cousins of eggplants) to explain the great myths of the creation and the cosmos.

• Visions huichol, un art amérindien du Mexique by Michel Perrin, Somogy, 2014, 224 p., €35.