CARGADOR PEDERNAL - OBSIDIAN SCREEN

Sculptural OBSIDIAN screen by Sabino Guisu, an extraordinary, indigenous and multidisciplinary artist from Oaxaca.

The screen carries 20 Obsidian pieces, of the type 'golden sheen' (Obsidiana dorada), a type of Obsidian that in the whole world can only be found in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico.

The work is grounded in the repetition of the A glyph found in Mixtec codices, a sign associated with the year bearers, charged with carrying and sustaining time within Mesoamerican ritual order. Transposed into the present, the glyph becomes a sculptural module that no longer measures time but materialises it as weight and tension. The metal framework operates as a system of support, while the obsidian blades activate a symbolic dimension linked to Tezcatlipoca’s Smoking Mirror—a dark, reflective surface that does not offer stable images, but instead fractures and confronts. Obsidian introduces the edge as a site of revelation and transformation. Rather than referencing the sacred as iconography, the work reclaims it as experience. Through repetition, cut, and dark reflection, time emerges as an unstable force, inviting the viewer to inhabit a threshold between the visible and the invisible.
Sabino Guisu is a multidisciplinary artist born in Juchitán, Oaxaca (1986), Mexico, into a family of pottery artisans. His work is deeply rooted in Zapotec heritage and Indigenous cosmology. His artistic practice spans painting, music, and contemporary art, using each medium as a tool for free expression and conscious play. Rather than pursuing aesthetics alone, Guisu creates symbolic worlds that address social inequality, ecological imbalance, and cultural resistance, positioning art as both reflection and act of liberation.