Peru, Paracas Necropolis Embroidered Corner Border with Eight Large Feline Figures and 100 Secondary Figures
This symbolically rich Linear style Paracas mantle border features a group of magnificent animal deities, ranging from ferocious to benevolent. The eight main deities are feline Oculate Beings with exaggerated eyes, alternating in orientation, each with a tongue terminating in a serpent's head. Oculate Beings in Andean art often resemble the Pampas cat, Leopardus pajeros - a distinctive species of wild cat with unusually large eyes found along the Pacific coast of South America. Inside each of the Oculate Beings' torso is a double-headed condor, and a variety of small, colorful, attendant felines are embroidered around the perimeter of the design.
The Oculate Being with a smaller animal nested inside of it is a classic Andean shamanic trope that signifies death, rebirth, and transformation. Rather than representing the literal birth of an individual animal, these chimeric creatures, skeletal in form, nested inside the abdomens of the larger Oculate Beings represent a mythical cosmology of reverence rebirth and transformation.
The Paracas cosmology is also present in the abstract structure of the composition, which suggests the ambiguous boundaries between the earthly realm and the spiritual world. South American shamans are known to fast and chant in preparation for a voyage into the spiritual world. The lack of perspective and the absence of recognizable landscape features in the design of this textile signifies an intermediary zone outside the normal bounds of space and time, accessible only to shamans and spirit animals who can traverse the boundaries between worlds.
Red and pink threads of extremely similar hue were intentionally selected by the Paracas artisans to create an optical illusion that causes the smaller figures to appear to be emerging from the composition over time. This type of optical illusion using color only to create the sensation of forms emerging over time was also used in the abstract paintings of Modernist Ad Reinhardt.
Expert knowledge of color theory was used to select perfectly contrasting colors, creating an optical illusion in which some of the deities appear to vibrate, while others appear to merge into a unifying field of color. With prolonged observation, the scene in the textile appears to oscillate, and the deities appear to be moving. The changing imagery and perceptual illusion of motion created through use of compositional elements alone shares qualities with paintings of some of the greatest early 20th Century Modernists, including painter Wassily Kandinsky.
Kandinsky believed that each color had a spiritual vibrational property aside from its’ electromagnetic wavelength, and that colors could profoundly affect the human spirit. Kandinsky wrote about these concepts in his 1911 treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Also see Anne Paul's PARACAS RITUAL ATTIRE: Symbols of Authority in Ancient Peru, University of Oklahoma Press, 1990. p. 170. Professionally conserved and pressure mounted in a Plexiglas frame. Acquired by David Bernstein in 2003.
Period: Peru, Paracas, Ocucaje-South Coast , 300 - 200 BC
Media: Textile
Dimensions: Length 45" x Width 9 3/4"
$39,500
M4003