Born in the Colombian Amazon and trained from childhood as a sabedor within the Nonuya tradition, Rodríguez spent decades preserving knowledge that had always existed orally. Forced to leave his territory in the 1990s, he began drawing from memory, reconstructing the forest tree by tree, leaf by leaf. Over the years, this practice evolved into one of the most singular bodies of work in contemporary Latin American art. The exhibition at MALBA, organized by MASP and curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Leandro Muniz, brings together a substantial selection of these works, spanning more than three decades.

The title refers to the mythic Tree of Abundance, a primordial image present in numerous Indigenous cosmologies. In Rodríguez’s hands, however, mythology never appears as allegory or fantasy. It is embedded within the materiality of plants, rivers, seasons, and cycles. His forests are not landscapes in the Western sense; they are systems of relationships. Species coexist according to rhythms of flowering, harvesting, flooding, and migration. Nothing is isolated. Every form belongs to a larger living structure.