Few things are similar to the yearning that emanates from chocolate. In Mesoamerican cultures, cacao was associated with the underworld, while corn was usually related to the day. Archaeological records in the region show that cocoa was a fundamental element of the Mayan culture, whose importance lay not only in its value as a currency, but also as a sacred object used in funerals and ceremonies.

Theobromine is an alkaloid component of cocoa that stimulates the production of endorphins, usually associated with happiness. Theobromine is a Greco-Latin word meaning: delicacy of the gods. However, this specific cultural value has been displaced by the sensuality of the commercial hip; disciplining desire, from specific forms of what we know today as chocolate; silently assisting, since the first half of the twentieth century, the universal simulacrum of cocoa.

In 2014, the exhibition Chocobanana Game by Honduran artist Adán Vallecillo was presented at the Christinger de Mayo Gallery in Zurich; presented— excuse the obviousness— in one of the world's chocolate capitals. What is not so obvious is that industrialized cocoa has represented a sort of organic fetish, symbolically stripped of all the framework of the political economy that gave rise to it. In this way, the global market presents it as a universal consumer product, leaving its supernatural characteristics intact; can there be any act of cultural exoticization more deliberate than this?

That otherworldliness could be thought of as the Oompa Loompa effect - I mean, it's no coincidence that Willy Wonka has kept those magical beings secret in the factory, hidden for so long. Not only do they work tirelessly, day and night, they also seem to enjoy their exploited condition. They are the silent worshippers of chocolate, though little aware of their status as workers. They are both the secret of the industry's "success" and the psychoanalytic symptom of chocolate. Without them nothing could have been produced.

The present exhibition starts from that permanent tension between the simulation of the product and the chain of re-semantization and labor exploitation to reach it; let's suppose that Vallecillo went in search of the Oompa Loompas and found them. In 2013, the artist made a research trip to Quetzaltenango, the southern coast of Guatemala and the Caribbean coast of Honduras, paying special attention to the different stages of chocolate production, from the cocoa plantations to its industrial and artisanal transformation.

The works that make up this exhibition are presented as abstractions, possibly not very different from the exercises that the techno-language of the market performs, but with a fundamental difference: their purpose is to unveil rather than to simulate.

Filograma is a particular example of this, the work is presented as a work of architectural design that emulates the patterns of chocolate bars, contrasting it with texts that refer to an anthropological view of the Mayan civilization. On the other hand, the Teluric drawings created from the chocolate pigment, become a subtle and delicious encounter between image and resource.

Sobrenatural is a project about the enigma of cocoa and its complex relationship between form and desire. To observe the drawings that result in an abstraction of chocolate, or to walk through its architecture represents inverse forms of sensuality; a sort of image that becomes chocolate; a subtle conspiracy between pleasure and terror.

- Pablo José Ramirez