The Blissful of Uneasiness of Form

Francis Marmande

Only through weakness may any metaphysical uneasiness be discovered in Javier Marín, in each one of the forms that he looks for within himself, in his Venuses, his warriors, his torsos and his horses. There is no uneasiness, in the trivial sense that is existential.

No, rather an uneasiness of form, a uneasiness of those giants with falsely serene ways whose bodies are all inviting at first. As we get a little closer —past that tranquility which alerts— although they still hold our hand and we place our trust in them with eyes of surprise, they communicate that “disturbing strangeness” which Freud (Sigmund, not Lucian, to whom Marín often refers) mentions, It is not tormented, lame or hurried sculpture; it is sculpture that leaves us peaceful. One enters the studio with the simpleness given an invitation, a visit, an offering. You leave devastated but grateful, completely forgetting the virtuosity so present there, because what Marín conveys is something colorless deep within himself, something unknown, striving to bring together the most intimate point and the least personal.

All his sculpture, though strictly detached from Mexicanism, seems only to have been created by the hands of a Mexican artist. In the cavities and protuberances of the forms that he wrenches from his dreams, in his modeling can be read the precision of the sketch less drawing, poured directly, blown in the air. As in a book, his peculiar gesture, the unrepentant grace of his hand, the print and castings of his fingers can be read. The infinite distance between his own delicateness, his feline agility. The melody of his voice his voice and the amazing forms they produce, as if they had sneaked out of him; the dramatic forms that smile in the distance, then the mouth, distorted by the scream, the muscles, borne by solidity and strength that would be acts of faith in the human being and in the pleasure of existing, if some imperceptible crack underneath the seams and assembly of those fragmented bodies did not allow itself to slowly discover, perceive and love, until being no more than that: Marín’s very sculpture.

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