The Weakened Body

Aurora Noreña

The contemporary mania to reduce everything to crystal clear, synthetic images for face le circulation ¡n the media has also touched art. We reduce artists to formulas and slogans that, instead of bringing us closer to under-standing the creator’s work, distance us from it.

Art should not be subjected to this process of apprehension. For far from being situated ¡n the most visible constants and certainties, it is concealed within the journeys of the mind. It is the locus of instability and uncertainty, where we cease to be ourselves.

Marín’s sculpture cannot be bound to its constants: man and western statuary, for its visual approach goes far beyond this formula. His sculptural work articulates an entire series of syntactic and semantic variables ranging from western art to that of other aesthetics and idiosyncrasies.

Much of his visual reflections and solutions begin with strict observation of his immediate surroundings. Even in passing, this is not com-posed exclusively of elements of a formal order, but also of a social one.

The social landscape or arena ¡s integrated into the artist’s work ¡n two highly distinctive ways: as an “entity lacking awareness of itself,”1 in other words, as something we form a part of, but we do not notice (yet it is present in our way of thought and action), and as an entity that is used to distinguish. The latter is when the artist undertakes a study aware of the surroundings ¡n a conscious effort to differentiate himself from it.

México City—where he loves and works most of the time—comes through in both ways in his execution: as an inseparable and undistinguished able entity, and as a whole fragmented by his analytical gaze.

When Melquíades Herrera referred to the artist as a “profession-al pedestrian,” he insisted on his capacity for observation (vis-á-vis his journeys through cities, for it ¡s at that speed and under those conditions that he is able to look at the surrounding milieu with a scrutinizing eye). However, he also emphasized the city as the ideal place to observe man, because it is the vessel containing him as a social entity (hence, the central role it has played in art and literature).

For full text queries please email: editorial@terrenobaldio.com