The henequen, natural agave from the Yucatan peninsula, seems was bound to live in perpetual sacrifice; aside of being sown over stones and maturing to solar fire, it was clipped off, its thorny arms cut and to these, crushed with cruelty, its muscle of fibers extracted to be industrialized.
So many centuries of torture did it share with his executioner of such destiny, the Maya peasant, to provide the world with ropes of henequen fiber that tied and bound from small products of domestic and commercial use, fierce bulls by their horns and monumental ships in piers.

Fibers of sun and stone today have been praised to the stature of art. A purified mind, a fine pulse tuned like a musical chord, those of artist Horacio Cardenas, have manufactured those ancient fibers with polish to give it shape and expression of extraordinary material. As fine as silk. As ductile as honey, we see him associate in intelligent shapes and move to acquire bodies by the order of heuristics. This invention is not mute in its plastic species it fraternizes to the tight and proverbial language in a way in which color, texture, and the forms interpret the moral content of the text that accompany it and the phrases of intent that spring from the thought, are a profound way of adopting figures.

The mix of henequen with words of thought, create the raw material uncommon in art. The material and subjective, not to be conciliated according to certain aesthetic recommendation in poetry, here obtain eloquent concepts. Works of chromatic richness, formal and subjective that if at times call forth models of the Mexican past achieve thoughts and attitudes of extreme contemporariness. Horacio Cardenas molds the henequen giving it the body of knit, palm, braid, tassel and with it, in the plastic space accommodates the movement to its harmony. It is something that the thinker artist creates to deepen in the human being. To paint for the spirit, proposes Horacio Cardenas. Project from the inside out. The surface is for tact. But these reflections are a different concept, so much that they develop a certain magic that originates, materially, of a hard fiber tempered with sun and stone and, sensibly, the thinking soul.


Raul Renan