Jorge Marín’s sculpture
The human figure is perhaps the great "constant" in the equation of art history; sometimes it appears only as a factor, sometimes it is repeated, and its sum reveals the result; nowadays it seems to be rather the mystery that we have to decipher. It doesn't matter how, but its concrete or symbolic representation has always been present in the history of mankind.
This may seem banal, but when mainstream trends tend to distort the individual in favor of the idea it represents, to the point of confusing the boundaries of sociology and art, it may be appropriate to remember that the body is the continent of the social entity.
The positions for approaching the human figure are diverse and often immoral, which means that the viewer, as subject, freely takes his own position, thus demonstrating his own human condition.
Since the establishment of Abstract Expressionism of the New York School, after the end of the Second World War, we have witnessed the bloodiest battle for the annihilation of representative narrative languages, reaching the point of believing that art could achieve sublimation and the complete disappearance of recognizable form, whatever it was.
But the gesture prevailed, and the reference to the Creator and to his corporeal materiality remained, even if it was veiled.
Fortunately, the new history of art has managed to free itself from those linear modernist concerns, with an "evolutionary" sense that sought to reach an ultimate goal as an end. It has given way to a simultaneous vision that, rather than disqualifying itself, seeks to free itself from the classificatory periodization of movements and styles, in search of alternatives that link even opposites, finding lineages or genealogies while respecting differences and proposals.
With the advent of this attitude, we find the emergence of narrative and figurative languages that place man at the center of history. In Mexico, postmodernity has generated new ways of thinking, not only about man, but also about his condition, which is now understood more as a series of clichés, in which social problems, as a whole, and gender, as an individual, have been the subject of critique and comment.
From a mostly ironic position, the neo-Mexicanists Javier de la Garza, Oliverio Hinojosa, Dulce María Núñez, to name but a few, commented on the "institutionalized" nationalism and its symbols - the macho, the Virgin of Guadalupe, or the national shield - as others, such as Roberto Cortazar, Rocío Maldonado, Javier Marín and Carla Rippey, touched with absolute freedom on the condition of being contemporary, urban or classicist tradition, thus confirming the expansion of the creative spectrum.
Jorge Marín's figure is born in a vibrant field of culture, in which he follows a unique path, converging and touching those of his contemporaries and those who have gone before him, but remaining within a specific field in which beauty is sought, without fear of criticism for its unfamiliarity and archaism, as well as without fear of criticism for its playfulness, which moves on a pendulum from Apollonian to Dionysian.
The sculptor may be said to be an eclectic, drawing on both the history of art and the collective imagination.
Since the beginning of his career, Jorge Marín's images have been as diverse as the techniques he has used, an explanation that can be found in his training as an artistic restorer.
On the one hand, this first training brought the artist closer to the study of the "making" of the work of art, often working with sculptures from the 16th to 18th centuries and discovering the secrets of carving in boiled wood or making paintings. with cane paste, to illustrate some techniques that will influence their own production.
While this is important in his training, I can say that his visual knowledge of art history is far more important.
Jorge Marín is an image-maker and faithful proof of the maxim that art comes from art; I don't want to claim that this is not derivative art or copies of existing models, but rather the artist's great ability to use appropriation and recycling.
First, I must say that these appropriations are the result of that "collective imagination" to which Hieronymus Bosch, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Paul Delvaux, Auguste Rodin and Peter Paul Rubens belong.
It is not a matter of copying, as I said before, but rather of quoting and discovering a certain "genealogy" of the rescued body; it is clear that in all these artists there is a constant, which is that of the body as an entity of containment of the spirit, but always showing itself in the splendor of its physical state; we could trace two branches within this set: one is full of the flesh and its attributes, the other is full of its psyche, it is the signifier that is explained in its meaning. This is how we find that in Jorge Marín's work it is always the being that is explained in what it contains, the body.
Working in series has been the hallmark of his production: allegorical figures and fantastic beings in the first place; the male body with its erotic connotations and the degraded body attacked by time and the variants that have emerged from their combinations. Faced with such a creation, it is essential to try to describe how the idea of man, a genre of the human figure, is conceived in our time.
In fact, we could think that the unified and total figure is the modernist reference par excellence, the human being, delimited at the time, with a solid thought and not yet changed by itself.
Since the Second World War, the figure of the being has crumbled in the face of the barbarity it has been able to inflict on its own species.
From the perspective of art history, Nicholas Mirozoeff notes that "the body has been the main theme of Western art since the Renaissance. At the same time, the body has been a site and metaphor for understanding and exploring political change in the broadest sense, whether as a political body in debates about the nature of sexuality or as sociobiology uses it to explain personality through inheritance. (...) Western art has tried to find a perfect method of representing the human body to overcome the fragility of the physical body itself”.
He goes on to say that "the tension between the inadequacy of the body itself and the idealized body in representation is a condition of its own representation," and points out that Sigmund Freud said, "All sources of unhappiness come from outside the sphere of the ego, convincing itself that it must distinguish itself and protect itself from the outside. The body itself is the first place and the first thing that causes misfortune.
Nowadays, the body is understood more as a space than as an object, it is the scene of the human struggle as well as its synthesis and memory; that is why the human figure tells the future of humanity itself, and that is why the body is a landscape.
BALANCE AND THE VITRUVIAN MAN
I said that Jorge Marín collects archetypal images from the history of art, appropriates them and recycles them through his contemporary perspective.
The reference to Leonardo da Vinci and his Vitruvian Man is unavoidable, but the most interesting thing is that in the case of the Mexican sculptor, the man is surrounded by a series of circles, which in turn refer to a sense of the universe, of cosmogony.
Keeping all the appropriate distances, because trying to paraphrase one of the most important icons in the history of mankind is a risk, Marín places the human being in a dynamic situation in which the only existing balance is the interior, since his position in "space" never follows any rules, it is as mutable as his desires or moods.
It is interesting to see how Leonardo depicts the human being in a double figure: from the front, with his arms outstretched to the side, his head, feet, and hands reaching out to the square in which he is contained, and in a second position, also from the front, but with all his limbs outstretched diagonally, forming the circle which delimits him.
Through the human body, Leonardo obtains the representation of the absolute perfection of man from the intersection of the two antagonistic figures of geometry. As we can see, both the genius of the past and the artist of the present leave their own readings: the balance and perfection of the age of humanism, on the one hand, and the dizziness and chaos of the present, on the other.
The idea of balance that the Mexican sculptor expresses is clearly related to the meaning of the spectacle, whether it is the circus - as indicated using tights and the exposed torsos that allow the body to be seen almost naked - or the carnival, explicitly manifested by the mask.
While it is true that this whole series of male bodies is based more on the effectiveness of their acrobatic poses and shapely proportions, it is also true that it speaks metaphorically of giving in to the temptation of risk and the biblical prophecy of failure and falling from this dubious paradise in which we live.
FINISHED BODY
Jorge Marín, with his delicate and beautiful gaze, establishes a dialogue in which the skin speaks for itself, recognizing in the flabbiness the symbols of eroticism that he holds so dear.
The turgid, vital, energetic body gives way to time, reappearing as the opposite of desire; it is the exhausted body that seems to contain the last breath of life.
Such manifestations are rare in contemporary Mexican art, but the reference to the corpse is common; Marta Pacheco has masterfully handled long series of "live" drawings-terribly irony-of bodies assaulted at the moment of death, run over by vehicles, shot by bullets, or dismembered at autopsy.
Teresa Margules and the "disappeared" - another irony - Department of Foresin Sciences collective, for a long time, have been making interventions that range from the treatment of the ashes of anonymous bodies taken from mass graves, to dignify what the violence of the city has taken from them, the right to a final "dwelling".
Jorge Marín's gaze, however, is different, it is almost aseptic, he notes that this desire for the immanence of beauty can only be achieved in representation, but that life, in its passing, insists on demonstrating that it is nothing more than an illusion.
The old men and women created by the artist appear as a point of balance and reflection, perhaps almost expiatory, on the celebration of life that consumes most of his creation; but his attitude does not entail puritanical mercy, it is the acceptance of the only absolute truth, that of the degradation of the flesh.
In these works, the talent of the sculptor is even more evident, who once again resorts to quotation and finds his models in classical sculpture; thus we can see how, without concessions, he dissolves the anatomy and reaches the high register of the defeated skin.
FANTASTIC BEINGS
Beyond symbolism or metaphor, the physical object of great quality, something that is increasingly rare, is present in this artist's production.
The castings that make up this chapter of Jorge Marín's production come from other series previously made in traditional modeling, in clay, from the live model that marked the beginning of his artistic career.
This technique has been modified according to the production requirements of the restorer, so that soon patina clays with the insertion of non-sculptural materials such as glass bead eyes or the insertion of objects, often of religious character, appeared.
Most of these works gave shape to a group of fantastic beings that mingled with the human figure; centaurs, chimeras, mermaids, and new hybrids emerged from his hands, arousing a peculiar uneasiness in the spectator.
Years ago, perhaps more than ten years ago, I wrote a short text, which I also appropriated, entitled Eyes that make you panic to dream..., in which I highlighted their peculiar character, somewhat surrealistic, funny, and perverse.
As time went by, the characters moved away from those first chubby babies to give way to winged, male and female human figures.
Works such as Paternity and Louvre are once again references to the recycling of an image transformed by memory and the individual creative act; in the latter, for example, we can see how figures as diverse as Caravaggio's St. Paul falling from his horse and blinded by the divine light are incorporated into the same scene, with others as diverse as those from the Abduction of the Sabines or the Abduction of the Daughters of Licipo by Rubens.
The important thing is that the whole works as a composition that tells its own story: a naked man holds on to the top of an obelisk while he brings a sensual winged female figure down to earth, while a third - also winged and masked - looks on in horror at the man's feet.
The artist's virtuosity is evident in his handling of complex situations of multiple narration. The organization of the group becomes even more tense when he decides to develop it on a slippery triangular prism.
The figure itself observes the characteristics of realism and synthesis that have characterized the artist since his beginnings.
NUDITY AND EROTICISM
Looking at the work as a whole, one of the key elements in Jorge Marín's production stands out: eroticism.
We notice that the male figure is more frequent than the female, who usually appears in isolation. The groups that the artist produces are few, but the ones we have been talking about clearly illustrate what Kenneth Clark states in his book The Nude, published in l956:
"The desire to take another human body and to unite with it is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgment of what is called "pure form" is inevitably influenced by it, and one of the difficulties of the nude as a subject of art is that these instincts cannot be hidden, as, for example, in our enjoyment of a poem, by taking the form of sublimation, but are brought to the fore, where they endanger the unity of the reactions of those who acquire a work of art in its independent life. Nevertheless, the load of erotic content that a work of art can contain in its solution is very high".
This is what happens in Jorge Marín's work, in which eroticism is a constant; it always appears as content in the relationship between the characters, who, despite their nudity, as Clark states, do not lose their "pure" form, but it is undeniable that there is a sexual energy that organizes and relates them, and whose "instincts" the artist cannot and does not want to hide.
In the example taken, we do not know with certainty what the final destination of the scene is, but what is clear is that the content does not even try to approach the limits of what could be called pornographic.
In general, these are works that breathe sensuality through the skin of bronze - or clay, as the case may be - the erotic potential is encoded in the spectator's recognition of what the piece means; there is a complicity between observation, reference and the intimate fantasy of the viewer.
The Mexican sculptor's work is dominated by the cult of the male figure, with its classical proportions and provocative poses.
The artist's position is equally clear in terms of his own admiration for the human anatomy, in which the formal vocabulary, like his figures, is maintained in a tense balance between Neoplatonism - with pronounced traits of admiration, passion, beauty, ecstasy and the search for the materialization of the divine - and the earthly, concrete, and morbid of the human body, which is paradoxically often depicted as winged.
Although the traditional iconography is practically outside the contemporary scope, it is essential to make the basic associations about these figures.
ANGELS, CUPIDS, AND OTHER MYTHS
The first and most obvious association within the highest hierarchy of the heavenly court - Western Christianity - would be with the archangels.
These figures are traditionally depicted with armor and ostentatious garments. Even when completely covering the body, these garments reveal the strong and muscular forms they conceal.
According to James Hall, angels are "the messengers of the gods, the agents of the divine and its execution on earth.
Their execution on earth is found in the most ancient religions of the East. In the Greco-Latin pantheon, Mercury was the messenger of Jupiter (...) they act as heralds (...) protectors of the good (...) whips of the wicked (...) or they may be the mystical personification of God himself (...)".
Many of these attitudes are recognizable in Jorge Marín's characters, who seem to amuse themselves by exercising their bodies while waiting, often on the prowl, for the moment when their services are needed.
Another association could be that of Cupid in his Renaissance representation, still as a sensual adolescent, before transforming himself into the chubby and mischievous child so used by Baroque and Rococo painters.
It is true that he would lack the traditional attributes of bow and arrows, but the masked face in Marin's own carnivalesque version is also consistent with the artificer of lust and "sin.
Finally, a strange symbiosis can occur between Jupiter and Ganymede, the god - in his eagle manifestation - and the kidnapped youth, all in one person.
During the Renaissance, "the young Michelangelo often wrote about Ganymede and other classical homoerotic figures in language that was as lyrically physical as it was romantically spiritual.
Ganymede was a shepherd, the son of Tros, the legendary king of Troy. His overwhelming beauty made Jupiter fall in love with him; according to Ovid, the god transformed himself into an eagle to abduct him and take him to Mount Olympus to serve him wine until, in gratitude for his service, the god transformed him into the constellation Aquarius, "the water bearer," and preserved him among the stars in immortality, always beautiful.
Most of the time, Jorge Marín's characters carry this spirit of eternal youth, which makes them appear as almost mythical figures in which the "divine" situation of man himself is exalted.
At a time when television, film, and other media are highlighting homosexuality as a human condition, the artist's work focuses on homoeroticism as an almost imperceptible subversion of gender, since the beauty of his figures appeals equally, unconsciously, to both women and men, regardless of which option is chosen individually.
As we can see, Jorge Marín's sculpture is a summary of the vital impulses of the human being and of his body, which he understands as the landscape of his own existence.
Dr. Agustin Arteaga
Miami, October 14, 2003.
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