The Brooklyn Rail

A wealth of riveting stories echoes through the galleries of Santiago Yahuarcani: The Beginning of Knowledge, though one of the most intriguing is left to murmur in the background. Now on view at the Whitworth in Manchester—and headed next to the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and Mexico City’s Museo Universitario del Chopo—this retrospective assembles nearly thirty works from 2009 to 2025, offering the most expansive look yet at the career of the self-taught painter, a member of the Áimeni clan of the Uitoto nation. It arrives shortly after his vivid, haunting imagery made him a standout at the Venice Biennale. Curated by Sook-Kyung Lee, Darren Pih, Amanda Carneiro, and Miguel A. López, the exhibition trades chronology for thematic groupings that reflect the artist’s enduring concerns: his clan’s origin stories, the Amazon’s sacred beings, and the genocide committed against his nation by rubber barons. This approach draws us deep into Yahuarcani’s worldview but leaves less room for a subtler story—and for a retrospective’s usual task: seeing the artist as such, with styles and sensibilities that shift over time and contexts, in his case from tourist markets to the circuits of biennials and art fairs.

The show centers on a main gallery, flanked by a video projection to the right and two smaller rooms to the left, with no set order or hierarchy, inviting visitors to choose their own path. In the central gallery, devoted to the cosmovision of Yahuarcani’s clan, some of his most recent and ambitious compositions make an immediate case for why global audiences should be paying attention. Anchoring the gallery is a knockout: El mundo del agua [Water World] (2024), a ten-by-twenty-two-foot panorama teeming with flora and fauna and dominated by large yacuruna (supernatural beings who contact humans at riverbanks), one of them advancing as if toward the audience. The work also foregrounds one of the artist’s signatures: the unique textures of his paintings’ surfaces. Having assembled the fabric from over ten stitched panels of llanchama—a bark cloth fiber harvested from Amazonian trees and prepared by the artist himself—Yahuarcani left its leftmost section bare. Holes, warps, and occasional patches record the hand-preparation process and the technical knowledge passed down to the artist by his grandfather Gregorio López.

As no other work by Yahuarcani makes the tactility of his fabrics so clear, it is an ideal introduction to his craft—arguably the reason it was also shown at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Here, the curators have intelligently placed it near the entrance to a darkened room screening an excerpt from the documentary El canto de las mariposas [The Song of the Butterflies] (2020), directed by Nuria Frigola Torrent. The excerpt shows Yahuarcani as he walks the forest with his son, painter Rember Yahuarcani, to collect bark for llanchamas, or sits beside his wife, artist Nereyda López, as she prepares casabe (cassava flatbread) in their house in Pebas in the Peruvian Amazon. Together, these galleries make a deft case for seeing spiritual concerns, natural fibers, and—crucially—art making as strands of a single, unified fabric running through the lives of the Yahuarcani family.

Yet, because the galleries are framed entirely by theme, the retrospective misses the opportunity to highlight how Yahuarcani’s use of llanchama has shifted across audiences and periods. If you look closely enough, however, the painter’s varying stylistic strategies become apparent. In the section dedicated to care for nature, the lower half of an untitled 2010 composition is filled with Uitoto men and women dancing in parallel horizontal lines—likely the Chicha de Pijuayo festival, suggested by the white monkey masks worn by some dancers and by the shared meals that are central to the celebration. The festival, practiced among the Uitoto, Bora, and other nations, has long been a subject for llanchama painters in the Peruvian Amazon, and from the 1990s onward, anthropologists such as Pablo Macera encouraged artists to depict festivities and cosmovisions for scholarly documentation and a growing tourist market. To meet that demand, painters like Yahuarcani filled their handmade barkcloths with dances, often in a stacked perspective that organizes figures in horizontal lines. Few of Yahuarcani’s 1990s works survive for display today—like other llanchama painters, he sold them to passing tourists rather than to collectors. While such a context is absent from the wall labels or texts, the 2010 piece points to a moment in Yahuarcani’s career when he took the interests of anthropologists and tourists and made them his own—shaping them through a distinctive, detail-oriented style.

Other works on view similarly show how Yahuarcani and his generation absorbed and reinterpreted broader currents in local painting. In the section devoted to sacred plants, El primer hombre garza [The First Heron Man] (2009–10) blazes in red and yellow, with a schematic central figure morphing into a sacred being. As in the visionary paintings of shamanic trances by other Amazonian artists, the transformation takes center stage. But here, it is the white heron—Áimeni, the name of Yahuarcani’s clan—and, by extension, his clan memory that anchors the scene. Notably, his family fled the Putumayo River basin in the Colombian Amazon during the abuses of the rubber boom, becoming the sole representatives of the Áimeni in Peru—yet they remain unrecognized by the state. The saturated colors and graphic clarity of this work set Yahuarcani apart from other visionary painters and are worlds away from his later, more textured compositions, such as El mundo del agua.

Yahuarcani’s aesthetic strategies—like those of any great artist—have shifted in ways that demand close looking, especially because such changes may be invisible to those unfamiliar with the negotiations Indigenous artists undertake when positioning themselves in tourist craft markets or contemporary art galleries. For all its strengths, the retrospective lets this history of negotiation and agency recede into the background. That said, by bringing the works together and through the publication of an extensive catalogue, it creates space to begin situating Yahuarcani’s ever-evolving craft within its historical landscapes. The catalogue features a substantial conversation between Santiago and Rember Yahuarcani on their clan’s history, several essays foregrounding the artist’s voice, and a complete inventory with reproductions of his works—effectively a catalogue raisonné that will serve as a touchstone for years to come. As the retrospective lives on in Manchester and travels to São Paulo and Mexico City, it will spark conversations that celebrate the excellence of Indigenous artists while also encouraging specific analysis of the shifting ways they have—and will continue to—assert their subjectivities through their artworks.