Secret Tree, Eliazar Hernández Arias And Nidia Del Carmen De La Cruz, 2021

Starting in 2021 to welcome students and guests to the IULM 6 building is the large canvas entitled "Secret Tree," created by Mexican painter and muralist Eliazar Hernández Árias and Nidia del Carmen hernàndez de la cruz.

The work is one of the key elements of the project"Suspended Bridges: the journey of cocoa between Mexico and Italy," from which the Ka'Kao exhibition, a docu-film of the same name, and two books, in Spanish and Italian, have resulted.

On the canvas, a cacao tree stands still in the center of the work as time revolves around it. At its feet is the god Kantep'ec, protector and founder of Tamulté, who gives a cabossa of cocoa to the viewer of the painting. All around, the wind seems to lift an endless series of symbols that have spanned the history of cocoa: Olmec stone faces, Mayan profiles, mothers and curanderos, but also distant signs of the Spanish conquest, of saints and devotions, of wars and revolutions that in an uninterrupted vortex bring us to the 21st century.

Amid the passing history, the tree endures and seems almost to breathe, emanating a series of secret words hidden in the folds of the painting. Like a messenger, suspended between lights and shadows, waters and skies, this tree, surrounded by amphibious animals, fish, monkeys and colorful birds, ultimately unites (like the exhibition for which it was born), the world to a symbolic inframundo and supramundo, generating processes of communication between parallel and distant worlds and reminding us of the most mysterious essence of the "historiography of the deep.