Ru mujaal’ Ya’
Ja rija, kebinkan chi ja qa K’aslemaal’ xa kani parwi ya’
 kowi ni maqotata toq noq jiiq’ qaj
Ja rojooj maxko nqapaq’ qii trij ja ruwachuleew
xar wari tur qa ka chiqe chi xa noq q’axeel chuwach
maqaxiinta, looq’ qa naa’
in looq qanaa’ qii o’jooj.

This exhibition compiles recent series and unreleased work by artist Manuel Chavajay. The artist uses an inexhaustible repertoire of artistic strategies to construct the representations that narrate his abstractions; watercolor drawings, acrylic and oil paintings, video-performances and sculptural objects. In this exhibition the artist takes us once again on a mystical journey through the everyday landscape that surrounds him; "the lake". Chavajay's environment and its boundaries is a universe inside and outside of himself—the infinite source that feeds his imagination.

In order to approach the work of this artist we must go beyond the surface of the artwork, we must approach his conception or connect to his worldview. For Manuel, people, landscape, their intensities and relationships with the world come from a millenary narrative that explains the origin of things. For example, in his series "Los Desaparecidos" the artist places us in time through a representation of the local landscape where the main characters are absent and at the same time present. It is not necessarily the chronological time that manifests itself to us, but the existence of time in Lake Atitlán. For Chavajay time is not history, but a recurring and constant present; what was, and will always remain.

Manuel abstracts the meaningful and emotive essence of the color of the forms he observes and appropriates. He then synthesizes it by pouring the pigmented liquid on the work surface, reshapes it, generating new intensities, textures and meanings. From abstraction to representation, what we see in his work is a process of transformation. The artist trans-forms what was into what is no longer, what we see materialized now is already "the other".

— Renato Osoy