Unquiet
Things

Somewhere, there is a mythic, lachrymose storybook from another world, and machumaYu is its illustrator and caretaker, both. They tend their inhabitants the way one tends a terrarium of singular, precious creatures: with patience, with devotion, with a face pressed to the glass, cataloguing every ceremony, every migration, every small and serious life within.

Inside, the cast goes about its business with complete solemnity: foxes and goats and wolves deep in their appointed tasks — a gloomier, more arcane Busytown, every creature with a purpose, every purpose shrouded in mystery — small cloaked figures gathering around volcanoes and caged lions, children sealed inside glass flasks, animal-headed scholars presiding over books and globes and celestial instruments.

I was deep in the “Imagery And Inspiration Of The Elements” chapter of The Art of the Occult when machumaYu’s work found me, the way certain things on Tumblr have always had an uncanny instinct for finding exactly the right person at exactly the right moment.

A curious blue dog-girl hybrid sealed inside a glass flask, guarded by a winged, scaled creature and a watchful cloud, disembodied figures drifting through sky above a medieval castle, each wearing a different head , tree, sun, flame. I knew immediately I was looking at just one mythology among many in someone’s expansive, fully inhabited, weird, weird world.

machumaYu’s inhabitants do not know they are being watched, or if they do, they have decided it is of no matter to them. A rabbit cycles a unicycle while playing piano, reaching for the keys with total concentration. Small white-robed figures hover in solemn a circle around a caged lion wreathed in flame, themselves ensconced in a larger wheel, part of a strange cycle. An owl-headed scholar, his body composed of stacked books, holds open a text with both hands as though the answer to something urgent is in there somewhere.

None of this is played for laughs. None of it invites you to find it absurd. And yet there is something in the cumulative weight of all this earnest, diligent strangeness, creatures going about their ancient business with the focused gravity of beings who have never once questioned the logic of their world, that produces in the viewer a feeling adjacent to a gentle fondness, adjacent to amusement, but not quite either. Something warmer and more complicated than both.

machumaYu’s world did not begin when you arrived. It feels conceived in a candlelit scriptorium by someone with a melancholic disposition and an extensive knowledge of folklore, deeply committed to alchemy and the collective unconscious, and indeed it has centuries behind it, ancient myths, founding narratives, lost histories of characters whose names have dissolved into time.

The Rohm Founding Myth gives us a many-horned goat presiding over a jagged rock formation encrusted with the ruins of a miniature city, two armored figures riding an enormous wolf below, an old-world map hovering in the sky above like a record of territories long since forgotten.

Universe assembles four animal-headed figures around a root-limbed child at the center of a circular fortress, a deer holding scales, a lion clutching a book, a hare with a crystal ball, a figure whose head has become a tangle of branches, as though we have stumbled into the founding ceremony of something that will long outlast us. And yet this world is not only ancient history; it has its own living present, its own seasonal rituals and natural laws.

In The Night Party of Flowers, a doll-like girl cradles a lizard beneath lush, oversized blooms that dwarf the surrounding trees, a flower with a human face presiding at her side, a human figure with a blossom head, accompanied by an accordian, and In Death and Life: The Cycle, three animal skulls rest on the ground amid mushrooms and small plants while swirling vines wrap themselves around fox and owl and hummingbird alike, the whole composition a tender and unhurried account of everything that ends and everything that follows.

The same figures return across machumaYu’s paintings like characters in a story that has no single beginning and no fixed end. Lions and deer, foxes and hares, wolves and leopards, children with enormous solemn eyes. They migrate from painting to painting, appearing in new configurations, new landscapes, as though their lives continue between canvases in rooms we cannot see.

They move through a world rendered in the muted, dimmed palette of something viewed through old glass or remembered imperfectly — ochre and ash and pewter, the occasional bruised blue, colors that feel a little moth-eaten and weather-beaten, dusk, and shadowed and eternally overcast.

And everywhere, containers: glass flasks holding girls and unicorns, domes enclosing entire ecosystems, circular structures, armillary spheres, globes. machumaYu is drawn to the world within the world, the small and sovereign place inside the larger one, which is perhaps why their paintings feel less like windows and more like diminutive vivariums: controlled and enclosed, rare and self-sustaining behind glass, breathing its own air, following its own ancient rules.

machumaYu calls it “bright darkness,” and spending time in this world they have built, you understand just what they mean. There’s a lonely, dolorous undercurrent running beneath everything in this fanciful ecosystem, and yet there is warmth here too, and tenderness, and something that sits just beside a droll whimsy without ever quite becoming comical, and none of these things resolve into each other or cancel each other out. They companionably coexist, the way they do in the deepest parts of the human interior.

machumaYu keeps vigil over this world they have built with the attention of someone who built it from nothing and knows every corner of it, keeping faithful watch over the brightness and the darkness in careful, equal measure.

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