A Contested Paradise

Things change according to your point of view; no given thing is ever the same to everyone. So we are taught by Kurosawa’s Rashomon. One man’s Paradise is another man’s Purgatory or a third’s Inferno, an ethical question pondered by Giorgio Antei and Maria Dorotea Gonçalves in the numinous presence of the abundant grisaille branchings, fruitings, and leafings that adorn the walls of the Mexican monastery of the Transfiguración, in Malinalco. At odds here are two contrasting sensibilities and two archetypical vegetal environments: on the one hand, Eden, entrusted to the care of a benevolent Gardener God, and on the other, the dark, impenetrable Forest Primeval, within which the incessant cycle of regeneration unfolds. But the contrasto (to reference the age-old literary genre of the verbal duel) between the all-too-real Antei and the evanescent and possibly nonexistent Gonçalves also represents a divergence of sensibilities: the distinction between those who commissioned those intertwining plants, a European brotherhood of the mendicant order of the Augustinians, and the local artists themselves, descendants of Malinalxoch, the sorceress who founded Malinalco and whose brother was the Aztec sun god Huitzilopochtli.