Exhibitions

Todo pesa Miguel Marina From October 22 to December 24 Santiago

There are times that painters hide things, conceal them from view. They challenge the gaze so that it becomes active and circulates through the painting. It is an easy exercise, you just have to let yourself be carried away by the surface of the canvas as if it were made of air.

The canvas of these paintings that Miguel Marina shows us has almost nothing on it in a gesture of raw honesty, so that there are no distractions and we can discover the slight trace of the instant in which the brush stained with oil and turpentine rests on the canvas. This subtlety reminds me of the "mute charm" that Delacroix attributed to painting and of which he said that its strength increases every time you look at it, because unlike the word that comes to look for us, you have to go in search of painting.

To go in search of painting is a fascinating proposal to stop at this exhibition, but if it is pigment that we are looking for, we will only find it in one of the paintings, the one entitled Todo lo que es (Everything that is), which precisely makes everything that the other paintings are also appear by contrast.

The work that Miguel Marina shows us is full of absence, what he paints remains hidden in a tension of rhythms in another place, in another moment. We only see the vestige of a fleeting and decisive movement, which keeps on the canvas traces of other paintings, where, if we look closely, we see its trail.

Traces that come and go, and that let us intuit that succession of decisions, so that the internal relations that sustain the painting appear. A series of paths that lead us to different centres of gravity that make it possible for everything to weigh and nothing to fall.

With this exhibition, the author continues the work developed in the paper-tablecloths painted in 2017-2018 during his stay at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome. To emphasise his position in the way of understanding painting from the need to continue painting. An invitation to abandon oneself in this appearance of relationships and random shapes to reach what George Duthuit called the "floating attention" so necessary to look and not fall.

 

Pilar Soler Montes

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