Cieba traces the path of the sun through the three levels of the Mayan cosmos:Xibalba (the underworld), Kab (the earth), and Ka'an (the sky). The piece begins in the cenote, the submerged caves where the Maya buried their most important dead with gold and jade as sacred cargo for the underworld. In the work, nature has found those offerings and grown over them into forms their makers could not have imagined. The journey rises through a dense jungle where organic and geometric forms merge, into an opening of pure golden light. Then the descent begins again.
The visual language is Josue Ibañez's own, developed over years of work centered on adaptation: how nature reclaims what was left behind and transforms it into something more beautiful than the original. His forms feel familiar but resist naming: flowers made of liquid metal, ancient faces colonized by coral, creatures assembled from glass and petals. In Ceiba, this language meets Mayan cosmology, a cycle the modern world moved past but that never stopped.
Cieba traces the path of the sun through the three levels of the Mayan cosmos:Xibalba (the underworld), Kab (the earth), and Ka'an (the sky). The piece begins in the cenote, the submerged caves where the Maya buried their most important dead with gold and jade as sacred cargo for the underworld. In the work, nature has found those offerings and grown over them into forms their makers could not have imagined. The journey rises through a dense jungle where organic and geometric forms merge, into an opening of pure golden light. Then the descent begins again.
The visual language is Josue Ibañez's own, developed over years of work centered on adaptation: how nature reclaims what was left behind and transforms it into something more beautiful than the original. His forms feel familiar but resist naming: flowers made of liquid metal, ancient faces colonized by coral, creatures assembled from glass and petals. In Ceiba, this language meets Mayan cosmology, a cycle the modern world moved past but that never stopped.
