Ara Naturae is a Latin expression which means ‘Altar of Nature’.
This series, which sits at the intersection of painting and sculpture, was created in dialogue with the religious imagery of the Renaissance. More specifically, it engages with works from the Italian and Flemish schools which, far from being mere religious paintings, constituted a theatrical setting in which the pictorial work was integrated into an architectural frame in the manner of an altar.
In these works, the frame is not merely a decorative border. On the contrary, its architecture, as if it were a doorway, emphasises and frames the passage into a spiritual dimension. The physical boundary between two realities: the mundane and the mystical.
In essence, every arch, door or threshold symbolises the transition from one world to another.
This reflection is a constant theme in disciplines as diverse as anthropology, psychology and architecture, with such thresholds acting as physical and symbolic boundaries marking the transition between different states, spaces or realities.
Such is the visual and symbolic power of these Renaissance artifacts.
Perhaps because I am not religious, when I look at many of these works, my gaze is inevitably drawn to the artist’s portrayal of Nature.
Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, with that marvelous Garden of Eden serving as the backdrop to the main scene. Or the many depictions of the Virgin Mary accompanied by white lilies as a symbol of her physical and spiritual purity.
In all these cases, Nature and flowers play a secondary, contextual and symbolic role, whilst the focus is always, for obvious reasons, the human figure.
Ara Naturae proposes to omit the human figure from these images and to place the floral element at the centre of these works, rather than as an incidental detail.
We could say that, in its poetic and philosophical sense, this series draws upon the natural world as a sacred entity worthy of reverence.
From this premise, Ara Naturae connects with so many poetic figures that our literature has evoked throughout history, from the mystic San Juan de la Cruz in the XVI century, to Henry David Thoreau or Charles Baudelaire in the second part of the XIX century. Nature as the ‘altar’ before which the human soul experiences the sublime: a feeling of awe, reverence, transcendence and absolute beauty.
As well as from this conceptual territory, it is rooted to some extent in philosophical doctrines such as pantheism, which invite a unifying understanding of Nature, the universe and divinity as a kind of absolute entity, in contrast to the notion of a personal God separate from the world. The spiritual, described as a concept that extends far beyond the boundaries of religion, presents itself as an encounter with the intangible aspects of our profoundly human existence, its great questions and its mystery.
In the current historical context, in which the process of hyper-technologisation is leading us down a path of dehumanisation at so many levels of our existence, my aim is that Ara Naturae may serve as a means of evoking our innermost substance as natural beings. And in doing so, I hope it will invite a profound connection with the very natural essence of the Human Being, and even with the transcendent and spiritual nature of that essence.

Rómulo Celdrán