I was born on December, 12th Retablo

Healing is central to Guadalupe Maravilla’s practice. At age eight, Maravilla fled civil war in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States as an unaccompanied and undocumented minor. The artist believes this trauma manifested later in his life as colon cancer. He chronicles his illness in this work, one of eight retablo paintings that record momentous events in Maravilla’s life. The 19th-century Mexican “ex-voto” retablos that inspired Maravilla are small, devotional paintings on tin bearing an inscription thanking a saint or intercessor for a person’s miraculous recovery from a life-threatening event. The artist commissioned the central painting from fourth- generation retablo maker Daniel Vilchis in Mexico City; Maravilla shares the profits from his paintings with Vilchis to support this ongoing artistic tradition.The English translation of its Spanish inscription is as follows:
 

I was born on December, 12th and I am very grateful to share my birthday with the Virgin of Guadalupe. I also found out I had cancer on this date when I turned thirty-six on 12/12/12 = 36. The following year on the same day I had a surgery to remove the cancerous tumor in my body. On this day I celebrate my birth, rebirth with my greatest teacher, the number twelve.
 

In keeping with the elaborate frames that often adorn traditional retablos, Maravilla’s frame is a dramatic, spiky mixture of luffa plant fibers and glue—a signature material that the artist uses in much of his work to acknowledge luffa’s role in purifying and cleansing the body.