Quetzacoalt - Karine Mimoun

Quetzalcoatl, God of transmutation

Inspired by the Mesoamerican civilisation, 475 sculpted faces., 160cmx90cm

Quetzalcoatl, God of Transmutation is a large-scale mixed-media painting measuring 160 by 90 centimetres, composed of 475 individually sculpted faces assembled on an MDF panel. It is the largest work in 1 Cosmogony, Karine Mimoun’s inaugural collection, and the one that most directly confronts the question of transformation: what must be lost in order for something new to come into being?

ABOUT THE WORK

The eye enters the work through colour. Against a deep red background structured in layered petal-like reliefs, their contours traced in metallic gold with a mirror-finish marker, the body of the feathered serpent unfolds across the panel in a continuous sinuous movement. The contrast between the warm intensity of the red field and the cool mineral depth of the greens that compose the serpent’s body creates an immediate visual tension, the tension between earth and sky, between matter and spirit, that is the theological core of Quetzalcoatl’s myth.

The 475 faces that compose the figure are first sculpted individually in clay, then moulded and cast in several copies before being painted individually and assembled on the panel. Each face, between two and three centimetres in size, is treated as a precious stone. The body of the serpent is composed predominantly of faces in deep mineral greens, malachite, serpentine, peridot and jade, their surfaces worked to evoke the density and lustre of polished stone. The rhythm of the serpent’s body is punctuated by two types of separations: the finer ones are covered in gold leaf, while the central ones are painted red and speckled with white, creating a visual pulse that runs along the entire length of the figure like a heartbeat.

The crown of the serpent is composed of skulls painted in vivid red and speckled with turquoise circles, marking the head of the figure with a concentrated energy distinct from the mineral calm of the body. Between the rows of skulls, small domed forms resembling miniature planets decrease in size as they radiate outward, as though the serpent’s crown were not merely adorned but surrounded by a cosmos in miniature, worlds spinning at the periphery of a force too great to contain. The tail, by contrast, is composed of skulls entirely covered in gold leaf, so that the end of the figure blazes with a concentrated luminosity that pulls the eye along the full length of the work. This progression, from the red-crowned head to the gold-blazing tail, traces the arc of transmutation as a visual and physical event: the passage from vital force to consecrated ending, from life to its transformation into something else. The background of the work is as carefully constructed as the figure itself. The entire surface of the MDF panel is covered in layered relief, built up in overlapping forms that read as scales or petals, each one outlined with a metallic gold mirror-finish marker that catches the light differently depending on the angle of view and the lighting conditions of the space. This background is not empty space but a living field, the world through which the serpent moves and from which it cannot be separated.

The Mesoamerican tradition

Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, is one of the most ancient and enduring deities of Mesoamerica, worshipped across successive civilisations from the Teotihuacan culture through the Toltec and Aztec empires. His name in Nahuatl combines quetzal, the bird of celestial beauty and freedom, and coatl, the serpent of earth, instinct and vital force. This combination is the theological statement of the deity: the union of heaven and earth, the aspiration toward transcendence held in permanent tension with rootedness in the physical world.

In Aztec cosmology, Quetzalcoatl was associated with the wind, with learning, with the priesthood, and with the morning star, the planet Venus, which disappears below the horizon only to rise again. He was also a culture hero, the mythological founder of civilisation, the god who descended to the underworld to retrieve the bones of the dead and breathe new life into them, creating the current race of humanity from the material of those who came before. His is a theology of transmutation: energy does not disappear, it changes form; death is not an ending but a passage; the serpent sheds its skin and continues.

Karine Mimoun's interpretation

It is this principle that Karine Mimoun transposes into her contemporary visual language. The serpent in this painting does not illustrate a myth; it enacts a process. The movement of the figure across the panel, from the dense mineral body to the gold-blazing tail, traces the arc of transmutation as a physical and visible event. The viewer follows this arc with their eye and experiences, in the duration of looking, something of what the myth describes: the passage from one state to another, the cost of that passage, and the luminosity that waits at the other end.

Transmutation & 1 Cosmogony collection

The choice to render the feathers of the feathered serpent as red skull spotted with turquoise rather than plumage is the most radical interpretive decision in the work, and the most revealing. It refuses the comfortable reading of Quetzalcoatl as a figure of transcendence and insists on the material reality of transformation: something must die. The ego, the identity, the form that has served its purpose, must be released. The gold of the skulls does not soften this fact; it consecrates it. In 1 Cosmogony, Quetzalcoatl is the work that asks not what we can become, but what we are willing to let go of in order to become it.

Acquire this work

Interested in acquiring this work or the complete collection? Karine Mimoun’s studio welcomes enquiries from museums, institutions and premium galleries. Price on request

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