Javier Piñón’s 2010 exhibition of collages is built around depictions of the highly charged image of the earth goddess Babalon, her attendants, priestesses and their mystical terrain unfolding in a narrative of liberation, sensuality, death and rejuvenation. Together the female players act as warrior protectorates and elusive guards of mysterious natural rites, often in what appears to be an acts of sacrifice or sensual oblation. The densely rendered surroundings are a culmination of the singularly meticulous technical approach of the artist, carving and sculpting his original two dimensional source materials into optically accurate, air-tight backdrops that seem to heave and breathe with expectation.

Piñón’s works reference a wide range of visual precedents, from the French academic William-Adolphe Bouguereau and British Neo-classicist John William Godward to American illustrator Maxfield Parrish and pop-culture cult icons like Frank Frazetta. He unites the compositions in palette, light and tone with snippets carefully culled from mid-century magazines like Arizona Highways and The Time Life Nature Library, a group of books the artists studied as a child. Expanding on past concentrations of the heroic male figure, Piñón here investigates the distaff half of his mytho-poetic narrative; nearly absent of male presence, save two figures disguised or transmogrified into animals, only male skeletal remains litter the sylvan sets of a captivating drama.

The artist was born in Miami, Florida and raised in Houston, Texas where he became engrossed with the ideals and expectations of the American West and vintage Americana, in general. His work has been featured internationally in shows including El Museo del Barrio’s Bienal and the Beijing Biennale. Piñón received a 2007 artist fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). His work and the exhibition will be previewed in the October issue of Modern Painters.