Selva camaleónica [Chameleonic jungle]

Henri Rousseau, known for his paintings of the jungle and other exotic landscapes, has never left France in his entire life. He painted from circulating images, from what he saw in botanical gardens or zoos, and from the stories he heard of faraway secret places. He also painted by imagining the jungle right in the suburbs of Paris. Rousseau’s excessive and unrealistic tropical jungles, inhabited by more or less ferocious animals, were a result of a Northern and nineteenth-century imagination.

A couple of images came to the artist Miguel Leal’s mind for some unknown reason, even before the title of this exhibition. All of them, in some way or another, were also connected to the jungle, or, at least, to a certain act or idea of what a jungle could be. Leal then remembered the old pattern books he used to flip through as a child, before even knowing how to read, which would take him to other places. He remembered W. Burroughs’ chaotic and viral jungles, where lost species and hybrid creatures lived. He remembered forgotten worlds inhabited by strange beings, where the disproportion of their bodies and the indistinction between the animal and plant kingdoms could still be observed. Above all, he remembered the infinite transforming capacity that things of the world reveal at every moment, exceeding the simple game of appearances to offer something else, deeper and more unfathomable. Only then did the chameleonic appear, and later, the drawings that open this catalog.

Chameleonic is the condition of a chameleon or of what behaves as such. The chameleon is a reptile with bulging eyes and a long tongue. Many chameleon species can change color by reacting to external threats through their own mood changes, from fear to anger, making them camouflage and invisibility masters. Therefore, the chameleonic condition is one of change, of transformation, almost as if the world came to lodge itself on one’s own skin, almost as if the world lived in one's body. In this chameleonic process, there is an exteriority defined from within, which is, above all, an experience of multiplicity. One that is many, many that are only one. But do not get it wrong. It is not about replicating or projecting a world onto us or one’s bodies, but rather about becoming the world, in some kind of imperceptible mutation which is also becoming-another, an experience of otherness.

Without a hypersensitivity to things of the world, that experience of otherness seems impossible. When Miguel Leal describes hypersensitivity, he is precisely referring to the mediumistic ability which allows things to pass through us, to be a place in transit. Ultimately, that hypersensitivity may be described as a telepathic experience, a tremor that runs through our body and makes us understand what touches us. One can look at that special quality of the bodies that feel everything but sometimes, cannot be touched, precisely because they feel too much. In their hypersensitivity, such bodies desire the world but fear it at the same time. They are so sensitive that they only feel the world becoming the world and, at times, this experience is so intense that it becomes unbearable.

However, in order to be truly successful, that contradictory movement, which brings closer just as much as it repeals what is strange to someone, requires one to undergo an intense process of chameleonic transformation, implying resistance to all crystallization, whether of identity, relationships, places or memories. Only then can one get close to (an)other(s) and to what is strange to them.

That movement might perhaps have a name: becoming-imperceptible.

And what could that desire of imperceptibility, that movement towards the world be?

Firstly, one must remember that, by nature, movement itself is imperceptible, which means, every movement implies a certain perceptual indefiniteness. Movement is what is only perceived in the relationship between two times, the before and the after. There is movement when one perceives this displacement. However, movement is exactly what one does not perceive. One knows there has been transit, but they do not know how to explain it, they have no way to suspend movement in the moment it is happening. For that, movement is magical and enchanting.

Deleuze and Guattari go over the relationship between what is imperceptible, indiscernible, and impersonal; they claim these are conditions that imply transparency. According to Miguel Leal, these conditions are connected to invisibility and to a deceptive function: not being what one expects, but instead what one desires.

Thus, becoming-imperceptible will be the success of a desire to transform, to merge with the world, to become the world, the entire world. In other words, that desire of imperceptibility is a desire of perceptual intensity. From wanting to feel the world so much, one becomes and makes the world. This is a desire which does not imply reproducing the world, but rather making it, in a cosmic formula that could be similar to witchcraft.

The images that came to Miguel Leal’s mind even before this exhibition, the images of the jungle, have that magical and bewitching nature that can be associated with chameleonic transformation. Therefore, if there is anything that could define such a transformation, it is precisely the same perceptual and magical intensity that can be found in the desire for imperceptibility, which is, as previously discussed, a desire for intensity in the relationship with things of the world.

Welcome to the «selva camaleónica» [chameleonic jungle].

Miguel Leal