Luis Rius Caso
Jorge Marin's childhood took place in a family environment marked by an aesthetic dimension. Sensitivity was on the surface in him and his nine older brothers. His father was a revered figure who made a tacit agreement with his ten children: play in your own world and do not disturb me in mine.
The father is an architect who needs all his time to support his large family. Through Jorge Marin's evocations, he reminds me of the father in Fabio Morabito's poem who turns his back on his children to face the world. The father's back is like this: the first door that childhood shows us / the first glimpse that not everything is breast.
In Uruapan, and later in Mexico City, the children cultivate their own bubble: the environment that will nourish creativity, magic, introspection, fantasies and personal utopias. They play, they trace figures from art books, they draw, they create shapes with Play-Doh, they connect the threads of sensitivity that unite the work of the hand with the muscles of the intellect and the spirit, which Henri Focillon analyzed in his famous Praise of the Hand.
Finally, the family dynamic is conducive, and Jorge Marin's experience is the exact opposite of that of Hanno Buddenbrook, Thomas Mann's character who suffers the tragic martyrdom of a family environment that fears, hates and punishes his extreme sensitivity.
The family bubble does not end with childhood: it is inside them and marks their temperament. It also releases its power in critical moments and situations: after losing a job that corresponded to his training as a graphic designer and restaurateur, Jorge begins to make figures with a small pile of clay given to him by his brother Javier. In desperation - he had been living from his work since the age of 22 - he took his figures to a famous gallery of the time, located in the Zona Rosa. It was the Riestra Gallery, a landmark of the eighties. Thanks to an immediate success, Jorge began his career as an artist in this space where he began his decisive journey and where the founding myth took place.
The eighties. We are on the threshold of a collapsing modernity and a contemporaneity sustained by globalization and the emergence of new digital technologies, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the socialist regimes, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the art that accompanies all of this: the post-conceptual and non-traditional proposals of art. Then we talk about postmodernism and the end of history, about the death of "modernist" art and the expanded field of sculpture and painting, about the unsightly, the suspicion of beauty, and the shock of the real. Not a few artists are moving from painting to installation and in-situ intervention, from the self-sufficiency of the physical object to ideas. Everything solid has vanished into thin air, as Karl Marx pointed out more than a century ago, and the system of world art is being recomposed (global, it will be said with admonishing insistence) with old agents becoming new and resigned, among which the curator highlights.
It is time to pay attention to the changes and make decisions. For Jorge Marin, the drive for immediate success is decisive. He remained faithful to a path in which his childhood and its mythologies accompanied him; his passion for two-dimensionality and, above all, for sculpture. He took something from other artists, dialogued with the pre-Hispanic works of Adolfo Riestra and other sculptors, but above all, with absolute conviction and originality, affirmed himself in the possible fictions of classicism.
From this (neo?) classicism, he faces an enormous challenge: how to maintain concepts that postmodernism tends to collapse... Beauty and the sublime, the unified and classical body, the value of fantasy, metaphors and symbols determined by the historical time with which it breaks.
Jorge Marin trusts in that aesthetic dimension that, although the new Moses of art denies it by decree, is there, in daily life, in actions, in the choices of small and large things, in the drive of desire and death. In bodies. In so many of them that we value and that we could associate with the classical.
Although their representation implies the risk of not being in art, because, according to the contemporary doxa, what is deprived now is the body without organs, the body capable of expanding beyond the form that allows it to contain organs, to go beyond one's own body and the idea of the human, the idea of the world and the self, the rigors of a visuality subject to a routine of three-dimensional normality. In contemporary representations, the ideality of the body is cultivated, physically, but in artistic representations it disappears to give way to metaphorical expressions that reflect the complexity of the world.
Jorge Marin, however, has his own strategies of representation and insists on an aesthetic evolution that acknowledges beauty and, even more, the sublime. The beautiful bodies are complemented by wings or postures that emphasize the perfection achievable through dance, through exercises of balance and grace, through the pure rapture of the sculpted form. They also embody the beauty of the impure, of being broken and defeated.
This definition, which refuses to accept both the body without organs and the aesthetics of the shock of the real or the abject - which presents bodily fluids, dead cells, organs in a state of decay, corpses, etc. - implies an Icarus adventure in contemporary art. It goes against the newly established codes. The beautiful broken figures embody the fall derived from this challenge, which also implies the search for perfection, for the limits of humanity. The "wings broken into shards of air", as the poet would say, the broken bodies give an account of that perseverance and that fall that is offered to our incessant amazement. They are the expression of contemporary man, the man who does not cease to believe, to dream, to create, to begin again, to desire.
The answer to this Icardian adventure is success; the enormous acceptance of a diverse public, both in Mexico and in various international forums, who are happy to consume Jorge Marin's works or, even more, to interact with them, as is the case with the unfurled wings. This spontaneous interaction of the public with the work of art, this constant reception, is another dimension that affirms this artist's proposal in an active and permanent contemporaneity.
Waiting, holding an orb or sitting; inserted in a circle that confirms the perfect proportions of a human figure; squatting, pointing and gesturing; meeting one's gaze with that of another; with the face uncovered or protected by a mask; complete or incomplete, the body constitutes the first chapter of this magnificent book. It is followed by chapters dedicated to balance, flight and travel, all of which have been crucial in Jorge Marín's career.
Balance is one of the elements that take the pieces to the limit of what is possible. There they are, endowed with an astonishing virtuosity, figures that seem to come from acrobatics, top sports and dance. The vertigo of the fall, of failure, threatens, but the achievement prevails, the triumph that affirms the purely human that has gone a little further than what seemed possible. The triumph of the iconic adventure that, beyond the human limit, unites with the fantastic.
Men like birds who can go beyond limits, but who then embody the challenge of naturalized metaphors. It doesn't matter: the images are powerful and the spectators never stop giving them flight. Ancestral fantasies that come to the surface, metaphors that perhaps express something that, as a species, seems achievable by simply stretching out our arms.
The mask, the carnival mask that covers part of the face in most of the sculptures, establishes another boundary between the self and the one I represent. I am the one who flies, who does the virtuoso turn, who is held in one arm, who dances alone or with someone else at the other end. It is I, or my representational self (I am thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin), who projects myself into an alternative, fictional reality that expands my possibilities of being.
Jorge Marin has wisely left the subjective interpretation of the mask's meaning to the viewer. For my part, I don't want to over-interpret; suffice it to say that I find in the mask an unsettling liminal element, between the self, its representation and the confusion between the two, as well as an element of mystery that involves the viewer.
Something else: the masks achieve a disturbing inexpressiveness in their characters, which increases their mystery. Something similar happens in the different figures of Francisco Toledo and especially in the two and three dimensions of Alejandro Colunga.
The wings are the fantastic component: the complement that the artist's creative imagination finds to complete the human being. They make it possible to fly, to go beyond the state itself, to transcend even more the magic of dancing, of diving, of a brief suspension in the air.
Flight occurs in our minds because people, like birds, almost all appear at rest, showing the beauty of their wings in various postures. One of the birdmen points to the sky as he gazes at a fellow bird. It points to the sky, but I would like to think that it is something more: an invitation to an iconic adventure, with all the risks that approaching the topus uranus entails.
What are these bird-like men? Fallen angels in the unadulterated pleasure of their weight? (Remember José Gorostiza? I don't think so). Perhaps it could be many things, and once again we, the audience, have the floor. Wings do not only distinguish birds and angels. They are also worn by demonic beings, ghosts, fairies, good and bad spirits. They are what each of us sees in them, and they are what we are when we stand under the huge open wings in the public spaces of various cities to take our picture.
The journey concludes the themes of the book. It is occupied by a very broad imaginary of fantastic beings, mostly hybrids, who are about to start something new. Some characters are blindfolded, others kiss, others ride together or push each other to take flight. They become winged men, pegasi, centaurs. In their broad combinatorics, they share a characteristic feature of this artist's figurative art: they are recognizable, but at the same time ghostly.
It seems to me that Jorge Marin's instinct or education has well assimilated the lessons of Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical painting, based on the second appearance of things. The Italian painter wrote
Every object has two aspects: the ordinary aspect, which we generally see and which everyone sees, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare people see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical meditation. A work of art must say something that does not appear in its visible form.
Like De Chirico's Apollinaire and many other figures by Jorge Marin, the bandaged men in the splendid boat in The Noise Created by the Collision of Bodies - reminiscent of the one approaching the Island of the Dead painted by Arnold Böcklin - don't need to be seen to feel, to have sensations, to get closer to the truth. Accordingly, they show us something about them that we cannot know by sight; their ghostly appearance frees them from an overdetermination that would leave nothing to our imagination.
Visiting this sculptor's workshop, located in the Roma district (in Mexico city), I find plasticine figures designed for small pieces, suitable for interior spaces. Others very similar, on a much larger scale, point me to urban spaces. I remember the artist's words in a television interview, in which he explained that his interest in exhibiting his work in urban spaces stemmed from the need to show his work to the general public, who knew him more through his fakes. This impulse of the most forged living artist in Mexico seems to me a fascinating work of relational art in itself. The public and the most fearsome of the picaresque of art, determine the work.
Another wonderful work, I don't know if it's entirely voluntary, is the kind of installation that is the workshop. On shelves and in various pieces of furniture, one encounters heads and torsos of beings that have already fulfilled their function in the life of the sculptures. They are plasticine and resin objects that live in oblivion. Small and medium sized, these remnants observe those who enter and ask them what they know about the artist. I knew little about his creative process and they showed it to me, along with the teachers who assist him in certain technical aspects. I thanked them for their lesson and the pieces thanked me for the visit: the gaze of whoever enters allows them to live a second life.
They are indications of the artist's fascinating creative process and inhabit the bubble that has accompanied him throughout his life. They will remain in my memory, sometimes appearing in the sculptures of their author, sometimes inhabiting like ghosts that area of memory where waking is confused with a dream that we do not forget. They are testimonies of a future that is already past, waiting for the arrival of other futures that will be resolved, as always, in the forcefulness of bronze.
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