Olga Luna

 Olga Luna was born in Lima, Peru, but her family comes from Yungay, inside a central valley of the Cordillera de los Andes, surrounded by the tallest mountains of South America, the Cordillera Blanca - majestic, awe-inspiring snow and ice covered giants of rock and stone - with the Huascarán, the highest mountain in Peru, inspiring atonement.

Across to the west is the Cordillera Negra, the black mountains looking like titans of another world. Yungay lies in a fertile valley that has been populated since over 10 thousand years ago by early migrants.

The evolving population and their homes were wiped out time and again by earthquakes and avalanches, the latest dating from 1970 when 50 thousand people perished, an avalanche leveling the town of Yungay.

Olga Luna went to Bellas Artes in Lima, travels to Spain where she studies in the Prado museum.

She settles in Paris in 1972 after visiting the Middle East, Tibet and India. Needless to say that these travels left something everlasting in her that is consciously or unconsciously used in her artistic expression.

I met Olga for the first time ten years ago through the Chilean painter Andres Monreal. When I went to see her in her atelier, she'd just finished a wall of 100 “burned” heads. She had made molds of faces, covered the surface with pigments and placed them in wooden Bordeaux wine boxes stacked six high and 20 wide, which looked like a mortuary.

Death was her theme. Impressed by the experience, this time curious to see what she'd done in between, the Peruvian poet Carlos Henderson accompanies me to her atelier one late afternoon, near sunset.

Her atelier in Saint Germain is inside a historic monument of XVII century architecture, underneath the roof. As we watch the light fade through the windows, we get a few glimpses of her “Hellequin” series and her folded paper work.

If you look at the impeccable technique alone, and wonder how it was done, - Carlos says "kinetic" as though a movie was made, which is true - yet you miss the essence.

Her Chavin background. Chavin is one of Peru's oldest artistically identifiable civilizations south east of Yungay across the Cordillera Blanca. Its first artists created temple walls with sculptured granite heads of mythological beings stuck into them. It was their way of identifying with the gods -- who were many.

Today Olga Luna has gone one step further by breaking her solitude of an artist, inviting other people to participate in her projects of walls. This she first accomplished in Lima where she had a hundred destitute youngsters from the streets or shanty towns come into the gallery she was exhibiting, plastered their faces with gypsum and they were transformed into identities.

Every one signed their name, their first and last name. They are death masks, but the person who made them is alive, looking at a state beyond our experience. The negative molds the positive, the skin is treated with local pigments - sand, charcoal, and other minerals - and placed into the boxes, assembled to form a wall. Today she calls her “wall-period” her 100 years of solitude.

By bringing others to participate in the creative project she's opening her solitude to a multitude and expanding the experience of art which should necessarily have the numinous feeling created by the full experience of life and death. This concept Olga pursued in Argentina, Brasil, and now in the south of France where a young girl of 8 is her team leader of a 100 young members of urban gangs willing to discover themselves in life as in death...

Talking about courage. She calls this wall not her own work, and distinguishes it of her recent paper experiments of mythical forms in three dimensions. And as creator of mythologies she continuous her work seeking the perfection that will meet the high standard of the Chavin and contribute to our human and historic understanding.