Cuerpos pintados

In November 2009, under the 9th World Wilderness Congress (WILD9), a group of artists, photographers and models, under the direction of Patricio Robles Gil, gathered on a hacienda south of Merida, Yucatan, to participate in an unprecedented body painting exercise. At the same time a celebration of the link between humanity and nature, and a provocative cultural event, the event demonstrated the extent to which the ritual and spiritual aspects of a practice that has now been recalled from a modern aesthetic perspective remain alive in us. Ten years after the congress, this book tells the story of that memorable exercise. From the models that lent their skin as living canvases for the work of artists such as Carmen Parra, María Sada and Fernando González Gortázar, among many others of the highest level; to the valuable intervention of outstanding photographers such as Michael Nick Nichols, Thomas D. Mangelsen, Jack Dykinga and several others, which allowed to fix for memory a record of what would otherwise be an eminently ephemeral act. Federico Reyes Heroles' essay accompanying the photographs serves both to remember the artistic ritual and to interpret it in the context of contemporary body painting.