Viracocha, God of creation
Inspired by the pre-Incan Andean civilisation
Mixed media — sculptural mosaic — Unique work 80x100cm, Part of 1 Cosmogony collection, 2025
Viracocha, God of Creation is a large-scale mixed-media painting measuring 80 by 100 centimetres, composed of 317 individually sculpted faces painted in gold and tiger’s eye tonalities. It is one of five large scaled works in 1 Cosmogony, Karine Mimoun’s inaugural collection, and the work that most directly addresses the question of origins: where do we come from, and what force set the world in motion?
The first thing the eye perceives is light. The figure of Viracocha radiates outward from the centre of the panel like a sacred sun, his form structured by textured rays that emanate from his body and extend to the edges of the work. This radial composition is not decorative, it is cosmological. Viracocha does not occupy the world; he generates it. The background of the painting is not a backdrop but an expansion, the world coming into being around the god as the eye moves outward from the centre.
Viracocha holds his twin serpent lances, one in each hand, the defining iconographic attribute of this deity across the pre-Columbian Andean world. These lances are not weapons but instruments of creation: the tools with which the god shaped the mountains, ordered the stars and breathed life into the first human beings. In Karine Mimoun’s interpretation, the serpents that form the lances are themselves composed of sculpted faces, so that even the instruments of creation are made of humanity, as though the god could only create the world through the material of the beings he was creating.
ABOUT THE WORK
The 317 faces that compose the figure of Viracocha are first sculpted individually in clay, then moulded and cast in several copies before being painted individually and assembled on the MDF panel. Each face, between two and three centimetres in size, is treated as a gem: painted in gold, amber, ochre and the deep brown of tiger’s eye. Most are also adorned with fragments of gold leaf, and some are entirely covered in it, so that the surface of the painting seems to emit light from within rather than simply reflect it. This inner luminosity is the defining sensory experience of the work: up close, the panel reveals itself as an assembly of distinct human presences, serene, meditative, animated, searching; from a distance, these faces dissolve into the figure of the god, and the god dissolves into the light that surrounds him.
This oscillation between the particular and the whole enacts the fractal principle that structures the work: the same pattern appears in the face, in the figure, and in the cosmos, mirroring the Andean theological understanding that the god who creates the universe is not separate from his creation but continuous with it. At the heart of the figure, the faces that form Viracocha’s tunic are painted in iridescent blue, shifting between violet and green depending on the light, and partially covered in gold leaf. This is the heart of Viracocha. The choice of blue was deliberate: blue is the hottest colour in the universe, the colour of the most intense stellar energy, the colour of a force so concentrated it becomes visible as light.
The Andean cosmogony
Viracocha is among the most ancient and complex deities of the pre-Columbian Andean world, worshipped across successive civilisations from the Tiwanaku culture, which flourished on the shores of Lake Titicaca between approximately 300 and 1000 CE, through the later Inca Empire, which elevated him to the status of supreme creator god. His name has been translated as ‘foam of the sea’ or ‘lord of the world’, and his mythology places him at the origin of everything: he emerged from the darkness of a primordial world, created the sun and moon, fashioned the first human beings from stone and breathed life into them, and then walked among his creations in the guise of a beggar, testing and teaching.
What distinguishes Viracocha from other creator deities is the intimacy of his relationship with his creation. He does not command from above but moves through the world at ground level, encountering his creatures face to face. After completing his work, he walked westward across the Pacific Ocean and disappeared — a god who creates and then withdraws, leaving his creation to sustain itself. This withdrawal is not abandonment but the ultimate act of creation: the gift of autonomy, of a world capable of continuing without its maker.
karine mimoun’s interpretation
It is this dimension of Viracocha’s myth that Karine Mimoun finds most contemporary. The question the god poses by disappearing is the question that runs through all of her work: what remains when the creator is gone? The answer her painting proposes is the same one the fractal structure makes visible — the pattern. The god withdraws, but the structure he instilled in the world continues to generate itself, face by face, life by life, in an expansion that has no foreseeable end.
The choice of gold and tiger’s eye tonalities is grounded in the symbolic language of Andean civilisation, where gold was not a sign of wealth but of the sun — of the solar energy that animates all living things, of the force that Viracocha himself embodies. Tiger’s eye, with its iridescent shift between amber and deep brown, carries the alternation between light and shadow that defines this deity: the god of both chaos and harmony, of destruction and creation, of the darkness from which the light emerges.
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