Henrique Faria Fine Art is pleased to present Libro Quemado, Leandro Katz’s fourth solo exhibition in the gallery. This exhibition brings together a selection of photographs, works on paper, and video from the 1970s through the present day that demonstrate not only the artist’s continued interest in pushing the boundaries of language and the mystery and allure of the Mayan ruins of Central America, but also show how Katz’s mining of material culture leads him in new directions in his practice. With this breadth of subject matter, Katz wants to show that to him art is a wide subject and open to experimentation.

A Canoe Trip (1970), a series of seven vibrantly colored cibachrome prints from 1970 document the artist’s travels to Mayan ruin sites across Guatemala and symbolizes a journey that connects different places through the act of looking. In The Catherwood Project (1985) he continues his expeditions to the Mayan lands, Katz taking images of the routes and sites that had guided Stephens and Catherwood in their classic accounts of the Yucatán peninsula, and compared them with the shots his camera took of ruins disrupted by the reinvention of archaeologists and restorers, and transformed by the massification of tourism.

As Cuauhtémoc Medina writes in the exhibition text: “It is clear that Katz aspired to create hieroglyphs of a new kind, and that these works were tracing the possibility of an early postcolonial conceptual art. Libro quemado (1992), a series of banners produced on handmade paper, seems to be the materialization of that program, including the rescue of the linguistic palimpsest characteristic of colonial chronicles. On the one hand, the multicolored text of the work suggests the ambition of inscribing "the blood of the songs". At the same time, however, the title of the work refers to the destruction of the word that fell back into the hands of the same agents, such as Fray Diego de Landa and the result is a poem of multiple times and multiple voices.”

Following Katz’s belief that “making art demands a total engagement as well as a dedicated resolve to completing one’s quest”, it is only fair that the same should be expected of his viewing audience. So now it is the time to stop reading and to start really looking.