"Endowed with ubiquity, the mismatched cryptophone hears the voice of things and also the voice of its own moods. I know this because the sky has become my brain. The sky is an organic whole with its own life, in direct relationship with the earth and the waters. This great body evolves freely and according to an inner logic of fog, snow, frost, caniculas and auroras. My body is also a dismembered organic whole, from now on I am a flag waving in the wind, and if its right edge is imprisoned in the wood of the mast, the left one is free and vibrates, floats and shakes with all its endurance amidst the vehemence of the meteors".
Michel Tournier: The Meteors, 1975
Jorge Marín seems to belong to that group of artists who, as the heir to a long sculptural tradition, openly and uninhibitedly travels the paths of figuration, with the certainty that comes from the knowledge of three-dimensionality.
From the appreciation of the primitive classical style, Jorge Marín faces his very own mythology, created from his vehement observation and study of the form of the human body and its dynamics. This characteristic of the artist reminds me of Deleuze when he states: "...the organism is not life, it imprisons it..."; and in the same way that the body is part of the fabric of the world and moves in a circle in its environment, the artist makes it an extension of this world, defining the body as the matter that constitutes his image, incarnated in his sculpture and in the image of himself.
In Marín's work, the composition plays with points of balance and tension that give a constructive harmony to the volume contained between the voids and the mass of the bronze. Both oscillate between the linear purity of the supports of his figures, where the forms, elegantly projected in space, constitute the dwelling of the subject that accuses; and the subject, which evokes a certain mannerism from its realistic resolution, in the activity that reproduces the perfect anatomy of the athletes and the fantastic figures provided with masks and powerful wings.
The perception of the body within the pneuma or air, perceived as the substance that animates life itself, transcends the limits of sphericity, that is, it frames that premise that Hegel placed between being and nothingness: from the finite corporeality that moves in the void, and phenomenal, and within an idealistic vision, it places it as an argument rooted in geometry visibly applied in the artist's work.
Jorge Marín's figures are characterized by the perspicacity of the eagles; birds of sharp predatory qualities, with a vast vision of the world that, from the heights where they reign as imposing gods and lords of the ether, and represented in their attribute of angels or garudas[1], are finally crouched as if they were cats ̶ also predators ̶ on spheres, windows, scales or horses, with a mask that always carries a beak as an affirmation of celestial power.
The paradoxical distinction that Marín imposes on his characters is striking: male angels who fly but lack wings, winged men and angels who play in the supposed swell like intrepid surfers, or tightrope walkers who embrace the existential cosmos in almost esoteric columns. I quote Tournier again: ".... I see the birth of a barometric, pluviometric, anemometric and hygrometric body. A porous body in which the compass rose will breathe.... Discovering this little secret of nature, I felt on my long left arm innumerable frictions of plush and silvery wings fluttering in each pore".
Despite his realistic representation and precision in the handling of anatomy, expressed in gallant athletic representations, Marín's works are hybrids of sensual arrogance. Some pieces recall the steles of ancient civilizations, where each module evokes the symbolism of a narrative. In this way, each of these seemingly dissociated sections forms a column that reveals an unusual and private legend, perhaps between the model and the artist, perhaps between the artist and the viewer? To say: Bernardo with or without mask, with wings missing or unfolded, women in rafts or spheres, in emptiness or content, whole or mutated. His themes carry the ambivalence that wanders between the imaginary and the irrational, and the unshakable reality that manifests itself in the punctual appreciation of the body in motion in and in possession of space.
In this exhibition, Jorge Marín's work once again takes us on a journey into a world that is mysterious, magical and mystical, but at the same time suggestive, erotic, amusing and clever.
Luisa Barrios Mexico City, January 2010
[1] Deities of Hinduism whose appearance is somewhere between human and eagle provided Western culture with the fabulous creation of the harpies of the Greek tradition.
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