The cultural space CASUL opens their year with a solo exhibition by Ricardo Mazal. Kailash highlights a series by the same name that Mazal has been creating for nearly four years. Similar to his other series, Kailash follows the artist's journey to a sacred mountain. While climbing Mount Kailash is prohibited, one can circumnavigate it, making a circular route around its base, a sacred pilgrimage known as a Kora. The mountain is venerated by various religions, considered as the center of the universe, it remains one of the few untouched mountains on the planet. The pilgrimage is slow, requiring eight to eleven hours of walking each day, accompanied by a guide and a pack animal that carries your belongings. On this path—which he walked alongside his wife—Mazal took a series of photographs that would later become the basis for the paintings in this series.
“My preference in painting is for a large scale. I always thought that if the painting was a little taller than me, I could enter the painting, and if it was smaller, like a window, I would have to duck. I always had this predilection for working on a large scale, because that's precisely why I could immerse myself in the color, in the movement, in the painting. The things that were coming out of my imagination and that I was creating, or the paint itself, the way it took shape when applied, was for me like a space I was living in. The painting [Kailash] is the mountain, and it's about climbing the mountain, because I had to be on a huge staircase to get up there. Climbing it and going down and climbing again and going down again. Metaphorically, that's the importance of this painting for me," Mazal tells CASUL in a recent interview.
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