Bronze is a mixed metal, a product of the alloy of copper and tin. It is not free for Jorge Marín to take it, to work with it as a metal for our race, for our country. We have been called "bronze race" before. Jorge Marín's bronze art does not lose this Mexican connotation, no matter how much and even if it surpasses it.
Marín gives wings to bronze: Angel wings. His bronze angels do not escape religious tradition. Angels appear in all faiths. There are Jewish, Christian and Islamic angels. Their number may come from astrology or from Eastern monarchies: four, seven, twelve? And his name, from the Greek, means "messenger”.
"Companions of Heaven", Christianity tells us about angels, archangels, seraphim, cherubs, and later about thrones, virtues, powers, principalities, and dominions. The archangels Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael are the best known and baptized in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But they are only part of a hierarchy that includes cherubs, without gender in Christian iconography, with male gender in the Renaissance image, women like the Angel of the Annunciation in the famous fresco of Fra Angelico in Florence.
And men, almost always young, sometimes old, in Jorge Marín's landscape of winged angels.
There are angels reading (but they are reading the globe, as angels are wont to do).
There are angels on their knees, as if praying for their own salvation.
There are benevolent angels, messengers of God, guardians of the divine throne.
There are mortal angels announcing the final judgment.
There are cursed angels disguised in metal masks.
There are hunting angels with fast and deadly arrows.
There are devotional angels who come to the aid of human beings.
There are angels with sex, which settles the dispute about the "sex of angels," since all form has matter and all matter has forms, according to the Church Fathers.
There are angels who are older than the world, because for St. Augustine, angels are the "first citizens of the earth.
And there are angels who are enlightened by God with the command: "create".
Jorge Marín's creation obeys this mandate, which in his case is not divine, but human, "too human".
This is proven by his angels - centaurs, unique in our iconography.
Horses with wings, horses that kidnap women, condemned for this reason to exile in the mountains, from which they have descended by the grace of Jorge Marín to meet those other creatures of danger, the sirens who tried to seduce Ulysses on the sea of the return of Troy, forcing him to plug the ears of his sailors, just as Orpheus defeated them with his superior song in the saga of the Argonauts. Defeated, the only thing left for the mermaids to do was to read a book. It is the Book of Discoveries, signed by Christopher Columbus, who defeated the myth of the beauty of mermaids by describing them as fat and ugly.
Jorge Marín's benevolent mermaids cradle children, as does his Madonna, this one with two children in her arms. Two Jesuses, the God and the Man, the Redeemer and the Crucified?
I do not want to go too far in my interpretation of the work of this artist who, in the end (like everyone else), defeats his own vision of freedom and traps his angel in a prison that we could piously see as a nest.
The protective "nest" does not save us from the final prison of death, and perhaps that is why Jorge Marín's vision is optimistic. Death and old age are crudely described in the figures of Chayo and Don Javier, and have been foreshadowed in many features of Tere and Isaías.
The artist gives them the ancient name of Apocatastasis, which means nothing more or less than the return of things to their origin.
Back, therefore, from the journey to old age and death, to the origin of everything, Jorge Marín gives wings to the old, rafts to the sailors, arrows to the hunter, mercy to the triumph, a horse to the angel, joy of life to all --- knowing death. everyone --- knowing death.
There are songs, a music of the spheres that accompanies everything. Celtic music, as Jorge Marín calls it, as if a common language, Irish, Gaelic, Manx, Breton, Celtiberian, met here, for a moment, in sculpture, and thanks to bronze, they sang to Mexico.
Carlos Fuentes
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