Themes on landscape

Matilde Marín’s works evoke forms of landscapes that could be imaginary, but also altered and manipulated by human activity; they could be located in Venezuela, Switzerland or the United States, all the places where she has lived and worked as an artist.

Currently she lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. While landscapes are eternally changing for Marín it is the intensity and radical speed of that change, and the largely unobserved nature of that change that serves as a starting point for her recent artistic practice. Marín positions herself in relation to the landscape as a silent witness. Her photo and video works – capture distances, a seemingly eternal silence in the midst of those landscapes that she reconfigures into art, expressing this sense of herself in the midst of an apparent emptiness of being and of others either as a series of photos. -sequential work or as singular documents, as well as the videos that have deserved international recognition.

As art, these works are an experience of reconstruction that Marín refers to as “the poetics of the real.” In reality, it is the physical in the microcosm or macrocosm that provokes a universal energy and that manifests itself throughout the world. , in nature, in ourselves when these fragments of vision are transformed into an experience that we consciously call landscape.

The nuances in the photos parallel the subtleties that exist in these real-life settings.

Marín says:

“My most recent work is a trip down the Rivadavia river in southern Argentina, which is preserved, therefore my work is a record of what should continue to exist. I think this is the time to become aware of our environment and of the ways to avoid its destruction. He called it the time of sensitivity, but sometimes I agree with the philosopher Guatari, I feel that this possibility is very difficult to achieve. “

While these works could be compared to various North American photographers

such as Ed Burtynsky, Mark Ruwedel, or David Maisel for the austerity of the spaces they document, Marin’s works have a clear South American accent, so they are hardly far from being a pure raw document towards a poetics of space, which it is captivating. She also ties the image to a gestural vocabulary that is intimate, charming and internalized even when the evidence is external and extemporaneous.

Truly visual, Marín’s art uses the distance we have from a subject to engender a feeling about what the landscape really is or how it can potentially be conceived.

These works are certainly about nature, but nature here becomes a landmark, an all-consuming presence, as it was for Ansel Adams, for example. The artist is a traveling witness to everything, infusing what is not ordinarily recorded or encapsulated in the form of art or video.

Itineraries, produced by Marín in various areas of South America, encompasses large unpopulated areas that are transversal and uncomfortable, finally intense in their beauty.

These are not the landscapes we are looking for but the ones that call for contemplation. Who is witnessing what? And when and where are these places? Are they ultimately the product of a consciousness, of a historical stanza infinitely reformulated in itself?

As we perceive an apparent archaic eternity in this work, we come to question what the evidence truly is or could potentially be. The environments then transform into steps that surpass us and even transcend our human presence.

John Grande
Ottawa, Canada, 2008

Anonymous and like a nomad, Marín travels to different cities and towns around the world in search of the cultures that will give rise to her work.

Seven years ago, the artist began taking photographs of the landscapes that crossed Latin American soil. Sometimes on foot and sometimes on public transport; Marín was facing a new journey completely devoted to spatial infinity, interested in capturing the horizon, a sublime objective widely explored, but difficult to access physically.

These strips of inexhaustible atmospheres, lines and leaks of light that settled on the very ferrous and textured continent; they became images that captured an ephemeral moment that began to bring Marín closer to the concept of beauty in the landscape and its limits.

Something that she began as a travel journal, had become the object of study to which Matilde dedicated extensive series and texts in the search to reveal the multiple forms and phenomena that the experience of the infinity of our environment confronts us with.

The exhibition A Continuous Line – Themes on Landscape brings together the series of successive horizons in black and white of these fragments that were succeeding each other like pieces of the continent and Marín was weaving into an almost documentary record of the immeasurable beauty that emerges from these territories.

The five itineraries that are presented in this exhibition are successively exhibited, seeking to apprehend and unfold a continuous horizon with which the landscape in all its vastness is presented to us.

Each one is unique in its presence: perpendicular peaks, rocky cuts and angles in contrasting tones face the apparent lightness of the sky where the artist reflects on the impossibility of registering this optical phenomenon only perceptible from the atmospheric refraction of the twilight.

The curatorial proposal comprises two touring concepts accompanying the photographic itineraries.

On the one hand, an installation with smoke horizons will be presented with theoretical support from texts compiled by J. E. Burucúa for the publication When I see the blue smoke of Itaca; and on the other hand, an anthological documentary nucleus with historical pieces from the Series Playing Hands and Contemporary Bricolage that show the close relationship between art and life, so present in Marín’s work, where her body is the vehicle of her aesthetic conceptions, through the act of the creator-object and the artist-subject in a true social and ideological commitment.

The exhibition raises as a central concept, the documentation of various landscapes portrayed in panoramic format, where the artist seeks to capture the atmospheric vastness of nature, inciting the viewer to reflect on the very representational limits of the sublime of the horizon.

The works show situations where the artist herself is a witness to peaceful atmospheres, stormy skies and an immense black smoke that emerges from the earth, as a record of the immeasurable beauty that surrounds our own humanity.

Laeticia Mello
Barcelona, ​​2014