Alberto Carlos Ayala (XX) - Kelimutu

The work draws inspiration from Kelimutu, a volcanic complex located on Flores island in Indonesia, renowned for its three crater lakes with variable and intensely contrasting colors. The name itself combines the terms “Keli” (mountain) and “Mutu” (boiling), alluding to subterranean volcanic activity that feeds this unique landscape. The hues that characterize the painting—red, green, turquoise, yellow, pink, blue, and deep black—originate from the exceptional geochemical phenomenon that makes Kelimutu a singular feature on the world’s volcanic panorama.
According to local traditions, the three lakes hold distinct spiritual meanings. The blue lake, Tiwu Nuwa Muri Koo Fai, is associated with the souls of the young; the red lake, Tiwu Ata Polo, with the souls of wicked the departed; the white lake, Tiwu Ata Mbupu, with the spirits of the elders. The color changes of the waters are interpreted as signs of spiritual transformation, and every year, on August 14, the neighboring village communities gather in the Pati Ka ritual, “nurturing the spirit of the ancestors,” offering food and tobacco in a procession that unites gesture, memory, and landscape.
This symbolic dimension translates on the pictorial surface as a layering of energies and presences. The white background acts as an active plane on which subsequent interventions deposit themselves: superimpositions, erasures, directional deviations, and material compressions. Each mark preserves the memory of the previous passage, building a sedimentation that references geological processes of accumulation and transformation.
The intense color fields echo the simultaneous presence of the three crater basins, transposed into an abstract grammar that translates natural data into painterly tension. The red introduces density and heat, the green and turquoise evoke liquid depth and chemical mutation, the yellow and blue emerge as mineral accents that traverse the field with rhythmic vibration. The black marks structure the composition as lines of pressure that organize space and sustain its dynamic balance.
The yellow-red horizontal band on the lower part condenses the energy of the painting and functions as an anchored axis. Around it the entire visual system distributes itself, generating a dynamic between stability and tension that reflects the mutable nature of the volcano site in reference.
The work is part of a broader inquiry into the planet’s great volcanic systems, understood as matrices of transformation and archives of geological time, but also as places where nature and spiritual dimension intertwine. Color operates as matter-time, translating into painterly language invisible processes and ancestral beliefs that continue to live in the present.
The work is signed on the back and will be accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
For material density, chromatic tension, and coherence within a geologic and symbolic research framework, the work naturally situates itself in a high-end collectible and institutional context.