The artwork represents a brilliant reconfiguration of botanical genres through a conceptual and highly political lens. This large-scale still life painting captures the organic, sculptural morphology of an American agave plant, which radiates an almost electrical glow against a deeply saturated, velvety dark plum backdrop. True to Miguel Ángel Ríos's signature style, the canvas features delicate analytical grid borders on its sides, juxtaposing the raw, resilient spirit of native Latin American flora against Western scientific cartography.
In the late nineties, and after traveling to regions as diverse as the Amazon basin and the Chihuahua desert, Ríos began to develop a body of work through which he addressed the meaning of hallucinogenic plants in the indigenous cultures of the American continent; a new cartography of the Americas but this time through other means of representation that account for the artist's subjective voyage into the territories of alterity. This art work it’s part of the collection of Bernardino Arocha and Mrs.
Ríos chose to use specific mediums for the “documentation” of each experience. A series of drawings made under the influence of the Peyote cactus convey in the manner of automatic writing the delirium of the artist under the effects of the drug.
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