Miguel Marina at The Goma

Artist: Miguel Marina

Exhibition title: Y así pasen los días

Venue: The Goma, Madrid, Spain

Date: September 12 – November 15, 2019

Photography: Roberto Ruíz / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and The Goma, Madrid

It is not usual for an artist to address a painting practice from paper but this has been Miguel Marina’s support of choice for years now, using it to map his aesthetic experiences. Reminiscent of skin, it is a sentient plane subject to the vagaries of time and its accidents.

Miguel Marina’s motifs are excuses for formal experimentation, which explains the vast spectrum of his compositions, from solemn motifs to more everyday and ordinary inspirations, as is the case in this exhibition. The most recent studios in which the artist has worked are located next to a river, which gave him an opportunity to observe it in minute detail during his everyday comings and goings. His visual field is coded by memory and by the emotional, sensorial components involved when circumscribing it in painting.

The works on view in this exhibition, in ranges of grey and green, were worked flat, pasting the paper whenever necessary to increase its size, but leaving traces of his action in the overall assemblage. The two-dimensionality of the low-weight paper takes on relief without the need to add matter through the use of highly diluted oil paint. Time plays a major role in this phenomenology, with cyclical revelations that erode the paper. The end results are evanescent surfaces which are very difficult to reproduce, not just because of the gradation of the colours but more for the inevitable reduction of scale and the appreciation of certain qualities, such as the painterly elements that splatter the paper. There is a combination of concerns in the painting (scale, light, surface and distance) produced by a hermeneutics of the river, of vegetation and sediments, of reflections on the water, the flow and the stream, the bodies floating in it and others submerged beneath the surface. This metaphor in the exercise of painting is catalysed through self-referential experiences that invite the viewer to discover a loosely suggested landscape by means of meditation and introspection.

Miguel Marina (Madrid, 1989) lives and works in Madrid. He has had residencies at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome (2017-18), Piramidón Centre d’Art Contemporani (Barcelona, 2016-17) and Casa de Velázquez (Madrid, 2013). In recent years he has shown his work at Fundación DIDAC (Manuel Eirís /Miguel Marina, 2018) and in the solo gallery shows Arcetri at Nordés (2018) and echarse a perder, echarse a dormir at etHALL (2018).