CAC Brétigny

Sailor Blue
20.04—21.06.27
Omar Castillo Alfaro

📍 La Grange (3, Grande rue),
Marolles-en-Hurepoix

Opening hours:
From Tuesday to Friday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Opening: Saturday 24 April, from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Free admission.
          
          Have you ever seen a painting or sculpture made entirely out of bird feathers? This is Mexican artist Omar Castillo Alfaro’s project for the solo exhibition he will present at CAC Brétigny.

          Sailor Blue invites you into a universe immersed in blue. For several years now, the artist has been exploring arte plumario, the art of feather mosaics practised in Mesoamerica for centuries and taken to a very high technical standard by the amantecas, master Aztec feather-workers of the Mexica Empire, in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. After the Spanish conquest, the colonisers used the technique to create Christian images for their missionary work. Today, these artworks are scattered across different collections of European museums, such as the Louvre and the British Museum, far from where they were created. A descendant of the indigenous Nahuatl-Otomi people, Omar Castillo Alfaro explores this history by filming these works within European museums and by bringing the Nahuatl language to life through a video installation in which he recounts a story too long silenced. The paintings and sculptures are a continuation of this gesture. They do not replicate the past, on the contrary, they question it. The sound installation, created with the artist-composer Méryll Ampe, accompanies this process. Starting with an idea proposed by Omar Castillo Alfaro — a space suspended between sky and water, like a bird in flight — he composes a soundscape that offers an immersive experience. In Sailor Blue – an ode to Sailor Moon and a title that refers back to their first collaboration – the colour blue becomes a space where the end of a world meets the possibility of renewal. It is an invitation to take a fresh look at the images and objects and the histories they vehicle, in order to better transform them.

Omar Castillo Alfaro is a Mexican artist from a Nahuatl-Otomí Indigenous territory in Mexico. His work draws on skills passed down through his family, such as work with feathers, clay, wax, textiles and stone. Through sculpture, installation, video and performance, he revives pre-Hispanic techniques and stories in order to question the ruptures caused by colonisation and contemporary ways of passing on knowledge.

This exhibition was produced with support from the Casa de Velázquez − Académie de France in Madrid. The sound piece was created thanks to the residency programme La Becque Résidence d’artistes in Switzerland, which hosted Omar Castillo Alfaro, Méryll Ampe and CAC Brétigny's director Marion Vasseur Raluy.