Sandra Lorenzano
1. AIR
Who are these almost ethereal beings that speak to me from a space that is and is not mine? Who are these winged beings, incomplete, masked, that hover around me? From which ancient poem have they escaped? From which dreams? From what faceless nightmares? What faces in search of roots? Suddenly the moon is the home they have created. Suddenly the whole world. They are the music of time. The present and the past. What was and what could have been. What will never happen. Remains, traces, remnants, of what hidden universes?
Here, bronze is both a contact with the earth and a vehicle for the air. It is in this liminal space - always transitory, always in transformation - that Jorge Marín's works emerge. There is something of a magical challenge to the law of gravity, a magical challenge to the limits of creation.
And then there are the bandages, which cover and reveal at the same time: existence stopped in a fold, in that "perfect moment" when the soul is nothing but pure life, the breath of who knows what gods. Cruel, perhaps? Ignorant of the eternal search for matter, they believe they are condemning it to dissolution, opening in each sculpture, in reality, a path of transformation.
Who are these beings, Jorge, that now inhabit my own body?
2. WATER
Charon takes us in his boat. Hades is our destination. But Jorge Marín redirects the course of the river towards life and light, his eternal lovers. Perhaps the gauze covering the figures standing on the boat is about to fall. We do not know. Imminence is one of the words that emerge when we look at the works: something is always about to happen. Wings that will take flight, the Mayan player who will throw the ball, a tire that will spin through space. A secret that is about to be revealed. The movement stays in place.
For Jorge Marín, there is no contradiction between the movement of the bodies and the supposed rigidity of the sculpture. One can guess his gaze, trained in his love of classical art. One can guess the gaze trained in the Greeks and Romans, in the Renaissance and its always strong and moving search (who has not cried before Michelangelo's "The Slaves"?), in Rodin, no doubt. But also in pre-Hispanic art and its traces in our history.
From all of them comes that meticulous knowledge of the human body that Jorge makes dance in his works. From all of them and from the most loving contemplation: the veins, the muscles, the gestures, every detail reveals it.
I use the verb "to reveal" and immediately its opposite appears before the works: to hide, and the masks with which many of their faces appear. What do these masks hide? To what ancient carnival do they bear witness? Which intimate and painful Venice? Are they fleeing? Are they keeping a secret? Or perhaps, as still happens in some traditional societies, they prefer that the artist not "steal their soul" by portraying them.
I come back to the boats. If wings seem to come out of the air -never the other way around: they do not occupy the air, but are born from it-, boats are Marín's homage to water. The second of the elements that characterize his creations. With the same subtlety as creatures in flight, the boats and their occasional passengers cross our visual space, almost as if in a dream. For a moment, we share time and place, then they continue on their way, who knows where, who knows what archaic stories. A mixture of men and gods, they are always looking towards the beyond, which is also an ancestral quest. There are Fidens and Bernardo, the violinist with Cerberus, the dog who knew all the lives and all the deaths; there is Daniela with an enormous flag that speaks of hopes and defeats, that speaks of all the homelands with all their wars.
3. EARTH
And the horses. In Jorge Marín's personal zoology, horses, like birds' wings, lead to other worlds. To freedom, many say. But I do not want to stay with the most obvious. I say that they also lead to the turbulence of our own inwardness, so often unbridled, so often set into a gallop without our being able to stop it. Sometimes they are Pegasus or Centaur, perhaps memories of other lives. Who can bet on certainties in a world of perpetual uncertainty? But horses are also the earth, the contact with the primordial humus from which all matter comes, even the material of our dreams. It is then the third element that shapes the artist's gaze. In the earth we have our roots. Also the bodies of our dead. There is the homeland, the childhood, the family, which in the end is the only true breath that will one day make us fly, or at least want to. And we already know that we are beings of dreams and desires. There are the embraces we have given and those we still want to receive. In the earth is the origin of bread and stories, the pretext for passions and wars, the abode of the last worms and the ashes of history. From the earth we come and to it we go. Bodies of earth and corn feed desire.
4. FIRE
I walk through the streets and Jorge Marín's figures seem to move with me, through the air, through the water -boats that remind us of our city's lacustrine past? Through the air, through the water -boats that remind us of our city's lake past-, through his mixed, blended, mestizo presence. Isn't bronze, as Carlos Fuentes says, a mestizo metal? Aren't we Mexicans the bronze people? High temperatures give birth to this alloy that has accompanied mankind since three thousand years before our time. In Mexico it is also our guts, our most secret image, the one we can only see in obsidian mirrors. Bronze is our purifying fire.
I walk the streets of this land that was once water, searching, like everyone else, for my own face. Perhaps there is no question that pervades our culture more insistently than the question of identity. We are eager for answers that name us, that place us in space and time, that allow us to (re)discover our roots and our future. The great myths of our culture are added and transformed into those beings who are men and women, but also lovable gods. Marín's works echo our questions, on the street corners, in the squares, in the sidewalks, between the steps of the people who have appropriated them. These works then begin to be part of a possible answer. Each person finds something there that responds to his or her own concerns and questions. Beneath the cloaks that, like shrouds, wrap the figures that advance through a Lethe made of all the fragments of our history, we are ourselves, with our whole body, with our dreams and our failures. Sometimes the wings they have taught us to carry are brilliant, others perhaps a little battered, but always supported by the strength of their dignity. I am convinced that each one of those who come to be photographed, to complete the scene that Marín has given us, feels something like this. Like the angels who listened to the voices of the city of Berlin in Wim Wenders' wonderful film "Wings of Desire", the figures created by the sculptor listen to our stories and help us find each other. This moment of encounter - or perhaps I should say of re-encounter, of self-recognition, of anagnorisis - is the true "perfect moment". From the individual to the collective, from the personal to the social, from the intimate to the public, between air, water, earth and fire: this is the path that Jorge Marín takes us.
Commentaires