Pachi Muruchu is an Ecuadorian painter whose work depicts the poetics, politics, objectives, and resistance that have occurred for centuries on Turtle Island. His images weave centuries of indigenous storytelling and ecological knowledge with contemporary experiences. He was part of The Clemente’s group show, The Fight to Free Leonard Peltier - Honoring Indigenous Culture and Heritage.

"The figures in Pachi Muruchu’s paintings are otherwise engaged. Deep in thought, in a book, in a memory or idle conversation, his subjects inhabit durations that exceed or resist the demands of capitalist time. They reside in dreamy or melancholy hermetic interiors, where plants and birds borage and red-bellied trogon—are braided into the environment, surreal, but unacknowledged as such. Each of his scenes is invested with references that are kaleidoscopic in their scope. We see elements from botany, mythology, European genre painting, and Andean art traditions; we see books on resistance movements and postcolonialism. The resulting canvases offer a kind of patch-worked history painting, or better, ahistorical painting.

At the heart of Muruchu’s work is a desire to access an animistic relationship to contemporary urban life. He seeks a return to what he has described as a “materialist subjectivity” that is latent beneath colonial ideologies. How can one learn from ancestral knowledge and indigenous cultural labor while reckoning with one’s own responsibility to struggle against occupation, he asks. Can one decolonize subjectivity to arrive at a perspective that grants respect and curiosity to nature, to inanimate objects?"

–Annie Godfrey Larmon