Like other places in the world, America tells the story of its origins through the entwined threads of the hands of its inhabitants. Finding the earliest traces of this ancestral activity is as complex a task as writing the family tree of all human civilisation.
When unravelling the pulse of this mechanical and emotive action of joining, touching fibres and building plots, it is inevitable to place ourselves as consciousnesses connected to the space we live in, in need of communicating a world vision and encouraged by that kind of creative engine that pushes us to re-create reality through the sieve of our cultural footprint.
Felipe Coaquira's work crosses various cultural phases within the colourful landscape of the assemblages between pre-Hispanic America, rich in precious craft manifestations, and the classical knowledge of the fine arts, with all that legacy given to aesthetic reflection and technical questioning.
"In 2015 I was invited to a Mapuche weaving course, where I learned to share with that wonderful community that kindly welcomed me and taught me their culture, the connection that was created helped me to understand and summarise that code of harmony from the same languages that we share as brotherly peoples being miles away from each other".
And yet in the artist's journey, as in Joseph Campbell's hero’s journey, we are driven to find our own identity before embracing the expressive flow that releases the full content of the beauty that personal history is capable of manifesting through the media.
"I remembered my childhood years when my grandmother came from Cusco to visit Arequipa. I used to play with her yarn balls while she was preparing her looms... beautiful memories came to my mind that immediately linked me to textiles”.
Originally a watercolourist, Coaquira draws on concepts of colour theory and composition that are manifest in the way he structures his works. From the preliminary sketch, to the starting points drawn with thread, the artist manages to structure planes, angles and foreshortening by using stitches
"In my case I try to look for a more personal language with the thread, I identify a lot with the cultural source, codes and narratives of history in the visual arts, its characters, toponymies, rites, etc."
The mixture of techniques at times baffles and introduces the spectator to a psychedelic chromatic trance where the saturated colours typical of the Andean culture contrast in an abysmal way with the postcard of postmodern concrete in which we live. Somehow Coaquira connects us with a force still latent and manifest in the Altiplanic religious festivals, in elements representative of the cosmogony of the Andes and in the ebullient spirit of the ethnic groups that build and sustain through art the powerful Latin American identity.
The baroque and exquisite spirit, of a unique expressive load, with flashes of diverse pictorial tendencies and at the same time strongly connected to the ancestral crafts, create a contrast of heights as considerable as the territory that shelters his work.
Felipe Coaquira is perhaps one of the exponents that within a classical symphony, would be the dissonant note, the rock nuance of an influx of centuries, perhaps the spark that denotes a fire of colours, a cry contained in the voices of an entire continent.
Felipe Coaquira was born in Arequipa, Peru, in 1978.
After studying Fine Arts in Lima, he lived for almost 14 years in Santiago de Chile, where an approach to Mapuche textile art prompted his return to Peru, after which he reconnected with his paternal cultural heritage of the Colca textile wealth.
There he began a prodigious trajectory in the multidisciplinary plastic arts that has led him to receive multiple awards and dozens of solo and group exhibitions throughout the Americas and the world.
The work of Felipe Coaquira Charca constitutes a visual hyperbole from the magnificent approach of suggestive fictions that astonish both in their plastic complexity from the multidisciplinary art, as the great chromatic handling of the embroidery by means of synthetic fibres and cotton, his pictorial work from the thread looks beyond a recreation between characters and fetishism, projecting scenes in a reconstruction of our context and history.