Javier Marín I Imagine Myself

Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera

Javier Marín’s art is the creation of a virtuoso. Describing his work with such a complicated term involves a multiple discourse—arguments that are a part of this text.

Art, in the first place, is the human possibility of transforming matter into expression. Such invocations/innovations have joined together in a sum total of symbolic implications of all types. They have also been associated with a series of pragmatisms invented/discovered by man, which have been related to their magical, religious, philosophical, artistic, social, and political concepts.

One of the meanings of virtuoso refers to “things that have the natural activity and virtue that corresponds to them.” I would like to begin with this concept since it leads me to an essential point in Marín’s work: authenticity.

Ideas that appear in a certain period have a decreed emblematic implication in human reason. In the Western world, ever since the Renaissance, if a way of thinking is emphasized and represents the majority or a highly influential group in a determined discipline, such reasoning becomes an absolute with such conclusive ideological content that it is assumed to be the sole road to follow. The accumulation of such opinions has a broad spectrum, ranging from science and art at the vanguard up to daily activities, and as a whole representing, in each period of existence or visual art, the “contemporary”—an adjective synonymous with evolution. But forward movement of this sort is a relative process and generally represents only a very small group of society, a group whose ideas do not necessarily establish a common direction.

At this moment in time, the supply of contemporary art is so decisive for the intellectual development of the first decade of the 21st century, that the postulates of such art would seem to stand alone in integrating the visual idiom and giving it definitive aesthetic worth; as a consequence, its conclusive preponderance leads us to believe that its limits are still at a distance. We must take into consideration, however, that all of the above ideas depend on the political and economic process that sustains such a viewpoint of the human race. According to current social activity, as long as there is a demand, there will be a supply.

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