ARTIST IN PROGRESS:
CHATI CORONEL’S COCOONING PROCESS
The cocoon is not a safe place, at least not for the caterpillar. It is not a place to sleep or rest. It is a place of the greatest activity. A place for the Great Work. The Cocoon is space for ALCHEMY.
In Alchemical terms, there are three parts to the process that takes place inside the cocoon. NIGREDO is the Latin term for the process of dissolution. ALBEDO is the process of distillation and RUBEDO is the process of integration. As Chati’s artistic process is entwined with her Spiritual process, this time of cocooning—a symbolic death, transformation and rebirth— is essential to her creation of new work as she enters a new cosmic year, a new solar return.
Part I: NIGREDO. The Black Work (SOLVE)
September 17, 2025. A few days before her 55th solar return, Chati asks the question, “quid dissolutio?” (“what dissolves?”). This is the dissolution of false selves. The necessary death of the ego. Consciousness must be broken down before it can be reconstituted to higher form. Today, she sacrifices some of her largest and best paintings to the process of dissolving her old self so that from the ashes of this symbolic death, the new self, the new work, can arise. She cuts these giants into smaller and smaller crosses/swords/airplanes/pluses/compasses/stars. Today, one of Chati’s 5-foot-by-6-foot paintings and five of her giant 5-foot-by-7-foot paintings are gone. Tomorrow, her Alchemical Cocooning process continues.
Part II: ALBEDO. The White Work (DISTILLATION)
September 18, 2025. Albedo represents the distillation process. This is the process of separating gross material from the finer, purer components— separating truth from illusion. Today, Chati cleanses the forms from yesterday’s ritual, alchemically refining consciousness, distilling the essence of ideas to their purest form. In the Gnostic verse, “Providence Hymn” the line, “The foundations of chaos quaked” becomes resonant here. All that does not belong to higher consciousness must fall off so that only what is essential remains in the work and only the artist’s true self emerges. Today, Chati asks, “quid lucet?” or “what shines forth?”. After purification of thought, emotion, word and action, after all that is impure crumbles to become the dust that falls to the ground, only luminous consciousness shall remain.
Part III: RUBEDO. The Red Work (Coagulation)
September 19, 2025. After the silence, the fasting, the cleansing and purification process undergone in Albedo, today Chati embraces the process of RUBEDO. Rubedo means “the reddening” and refers to the deep red colour that appears in the final stages of alchemical operations resulting in red powders, red oils or the “red lion”. It is the red of the phoenix and the red of the rose on the black cross in Rosicrucian symbolism.
Today, on the day of her 55th solar return Chati takes the crosses from the sacrificed and cut giant paintings from the Nigredo aspect of the process, which were cleaned and blessed with sacred oil in the Albedo process and with these crosses, she will create a crown. The crown transforms the consciousness that was given up and sacrificed through the cutting of the paintings into the higher consciousness of Spiritual and material victory. The creative process becomes the cause, the “as below” that will result in the higher transformation of consciousness (“so above”).
Through this last step in the process, the artist integrates Spirit with matter and sanctifies it. In the alchemical process, as in the Rosicrucian text, “The Chemical Wedding” by Christian Rosenkreutz, a sacred union takes place at the end of the ritual— a marriage between the King and Queen, symbolizing the integration of new consciousness with matter. In the cocooning process, the earthly being of the caterpillar which crawls on the ground and consumes, transforms into the butterfly which takes to the air to pollinate.
As Chati creates the crown made of her cut paintings, she dissolves inherited patterns and the old consciousness from which these paintings emerged so that she can participate in the same mystery that transforms caterpillars to butterflies, base metal into gold, and human beings into consciously regenerated co-creators of the universe.
CHATI CORONEL’S
FIGURATIVE SPATIALISM
I begin in silence.
Not metaphorical silence—real, dimensional quiet. A void, made of color. A field that doesn’t depict anything but remembers everything. This is not background. This is origin. Each painting begins with this void. It is my way of reaching back—before form, before thought, before time. A state of unity, of oneness. From here, I build. Layer by layer.
The second layer: transmission. Semi-translucent symbols float above the void—gestures pulled from the margins of esoteric texts, cosmological diagrams, Gnostic hymns, alchemical blueprints. These marks do not explain; they invoke. They come from a spiritual practice older than language. They are the quiet codes of a body trying to remember its source.
Then come the silhouettes. Figures—but not portraits. These are not individuals. These are human thresholds. Empty forms surrounded by atmosphere. I do not fill them; I leave them open. The body becomes space. The body becomes the opening. You do not look at it—you look through it. Inside each silhouette is the earlier work: the symbols, the void, the memory of stillness. You see it only through absence.
And then I do it again. More layers. More openings. I am not painting a moment. I am painting time. Each layer is a breath, a door, a veil. A spiritual muscle being stretched outward from my center until I meet the edge of form—until the painting arrives and says: this is the boundary. Stop here. I paint from the inside out. I do not plan; I listen. The painting tells me when to pause, when to seal, when to split open. The final work holds the entire journey. It is an excavation of light from darkness. An offering.
My process is devotional but not soft. This is a rebellion against forgetting. Against the flattening of spirit into product. Against the empire of speed. I don’t paint what is seen. I paint what is felt when silence speaks. What is revealed when softness becomes strategy. When the body becomes cosmos, and the image becomes a door. Every silhouette I leave empty is an invitation: Look again. Feel harder. Remember. What emerges is not an image—it’s a map. A vessel. A layered transmission meant to be seen with the body, not the eye. These works do not speak in caption. They speak in pulse. You don’t have to understand them. You have to stand in front of them.
They will do the rest.
