A breath that travels from the depths of the Peruvian Amazon to London… Rember Yahuarcani’s first UK solo exhibition, Here Lives the Origin at Josh Lilley, opens the door to a world where existence, memory and spirits are inextricably entwined.
In Yahuarcani’s paintings, time does not flow along a single line; the past sits at the same table as the present. Gods, animals, water spirits, plants and humans—all multiply within the same breath. As one of the bearers of Uitoto mythology, the artist constructs his canvases not merely as spaces of representation but as ceremonial arenas. When the viewer looks at this world, they do not step onto a stage; they enter a living cosmogony.
Each of Yahuarcani’s canvases is a doorway carrying the voices of his ancestors into the present. The stories he heard in the Amazon geography of his childhood, the tales passed down by his grandmother Martha, and the mythic narratives filtered through generations are reborn in the paintings as colour and movement. In this world, myths are not a dusty past; they are a living force that shapes the present, a kind of compass.
The artist’s figures are neither fully animal nor fully human—they exist in a fluid state between the two. It is as though the boundary line has long been erased; human and forest, spirit and body have touched one another. This touch also nourishes the political layer of the paintings. Yahuarcani openly recalls the cycles of colonisation, displacement, loss and oppression that the Uitoto people have faced throughout history, yet he does so not with lament but with the aesthetics of resistance.
The energy permeating the colours is the expression of a people, a geography and a spirit that endure.
It is as if every canvas declares: “We are here—and we will continue to be here.”
As the artist himself says: “This is the way Martha saw the universe.”
And the universe Martha saw is still breathing today.
Here Lives the Origin does precisely that: it shows how roots live in the present, how the past transforms into the future.
Throughout the exhibition, the viewer does not feel like someone observing a narrative from the outside, but like someone passing through the narrative itself. As the rhythm of the forest carries from one canvas to the next, the non-linear nature of time slowly circulates within the space. Myth is no longer distant; it reveals its face.
This is not merely a painting exhibition.
It is the visible manifestation of a people’s voice, knowledge, memory and breath.
Exhibition Details
- Rember Yahuarcani – Here Lives the Origin
- Josh Lilley, London
- Continues until 13 December 2025
