by Luis-Martín Lozano
The work of the young Mexican sculptor and painter Jorge Marín hardly goes unnoticed by the ordinary observer. There is something special about it that attracts the attention of friends and strangers alike. Although he has earned the respect of critics and collectors over the years and has greatly improved his craft, Jorge Marín remains a little-known artist abroad. It is not common to find him listed in the catalogs of group exhibitions of contemporary Mexican art shown outside our borders. On the contrary, he is an artist who has been able to create his own iconographic world and is therefore not part of the generational concerns of the practitioners of installation, photography and video.
Jorge Marín is more of an academic artist, if by academy we mean a sincere appreciation for the craft, a special dedication to drawing and a deep admiration for anatomy and physical expression.
A sincere appreciation for the craft, a special dedication to drawing and a deep admiration for anatomy and physical expression. These virtues, which would have been appreciated in the Renaissance or in the 19th century, do not seem to interest the curators of biennials or alternative spaces today. But they find their proper dimension in the museum, where they can enter into dialogue with the pre-modern tradition of art history, and in a context where time prevails over stylistic fashions.
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It must be said, however, that Jorge Marín's search, which has now reached its full maturity, is not solitary, nor is it the result of an absence of dialogue with the history of art itself. Jorge's concerns are shared by a select group of Mexican painters and sculptors, as well as foreigners, who have always been able to turn their eyes to the past in order to appreciate the lessons taught by the great artists of history. But it must be said that their review is never passive, nor is it a nostalgic recollection of better times. No, his vision is completely contemporary, his approach is from the present, perhaps from the uneasiness of contemporaneity, but always current, always in force. What happens is that the subjects that interest Jorge Marín are, in the end, the subjects that have always been the fundamental reflection of artists in all times: man, his place in time and his place in the cosmos.
From this perspective, it is possible to situate Jorge Marín's work in relation to the work of other Mexican painters with whom he coincided in the eighties, since there are strong expressive links between Jorge Marín and Roberto Cortázar, and the same could be said of the hermeticism that links some of Marín's oil paintings to the works of Arturo Rivera. All three converge in the aesthetic debates of postmodernism, especially with regard to the critical capacity of artists to reassume from the present a freedom to arbitrarily reassume the formal notions of the past. Nevertheless, the moment in which they converge is precisely the moment in which they begin to separate, and it is here that Jorge Marín's qualities stand out. As a painter, Marín does not reproduce himself indefinitely in drawing, he is never enraptured by technique and knows that it is only an instrument to explore the expressive potential of the human body. Although the drawing gives a glimpse of the exceptional skill that Marín achieves, the truth is that the drawing only allows him to give form to the profound conceptual reflections that Jorge Marín's meditative nudes pose before the spectator, as can be seen in very successful works such as "Mujer Enigmata", "Anciana Alada" and "V Corum", to name just three excellent examples.
Similarly, the infinite reflection offered by Cronos is one of the conceptual forces that legitimizes Jorge Marín's work. A connoisseur of art history, Marín recovers the emblematic role of insects as a reminder of the transience of life. In a way, he shares the curious, obsessive and scientific view that Dürer, for example, had of them, but he is closer to the Flemish painters of the 17th century, when their butterflies and beetles allude to the cycles of life, death and resurrection. No less important, and it seems to me that it should be emphasized, is Jorge Marín's remarkable ability to project the volumetric presence of bodies in space, both in his painting and in his sculpture. In them there is always a natural grace, not at all artificial and very playful, to appreciate the body in motion -sometimes full of its internal energy, as in the sculptural series of the tightrope walkers- or the body in transition, assuming the ravages of time on the gravity of its anatomy; a seriousness that Jorge Marín sometimes tries to escape when he plays with the iconoclastic representation of children, Madonnas, cherubs and mermaids. Personally, they do not seem to me the most accomplished of his sculptures, although I understand the origin and the festive sense of his themes: the intellectual play of the Mexican Baroque.
As you can see, Jorge Marín is an artist with many talents. He is passionate about sculptural and pictorial techniques, as if he were the heir of a Venetian restorer. He is also a connoisseur of the human body, which he understands in its dynamics of time and the cosmos. And perhaps the most valuable thing, from my point of view as an art historian, is that he is an artist who feels comfortable and free to establish natural dialogues with tradition; without losing sight of the fact that he is reflecting from his own moment, from his own time, from the limits of the twentieth century and the advent of the new millennium. Here are some of the revealed secrets of the Hermetic Balance.
Mexico City, June 2002.
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