Artist: Marina Vargas
Exhibition title: Nadie es inmune
Curator: Omar-Pascual Castillo
Dates: 26.10.2012 – 10.02.2013
Place: CAAM – Los Balcones 11. Planta 2. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Spain.
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 9pm. and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
When works of art -whether classical, pre-modern, modern or contemporary- do not leave you indifferent, they achieve their goal. They pull the questions, sensations, feelings, memories or ideas out of the viewer about the experience of seeing the work that their presence evokes. Marina Vargas is an artist born in Granada, Spain in 1980 and she undeniably achieves that experience. In front of any work in her wide-ranging oeuvre, which ranges from drawing, painting, sculptural-painting, sculpture, photography, video and more pictorial-drawing based installation, you cannot remain indifferent. She forces you to situate yourself in front of her work like someone who is witnessing an expression of emotion, delving into our fears and desires, at times even using a scatological act we may find disgusting. Under these conditions, produced by the viscerality she has made herself known for, the aesthetic divergence of her baroqueness, or its symbolic unfolding, the artist traps you into a relationship of LOVE/HATE, attraction/rejection, empathy/apathy… before what is manifested in our eyes as her art. This situation arises because of a very elemental operation of the structural dichotomy of the visual tools with which the artist usually works; she puts her visions of life and death, faith and agnosticism, and the order and chaos of our times and our past before our gaze.
Her work is charged with drama, brutality and beauty combined, and in it, the internal world (where the meaning of things resides) comes into view bathed in curative blood, fineries and pearlescent light. It is a place where violence is tamed by the forest undergrowth, where the deity is baptised by the beauty of the caress of the other, who is the one who venerates her most.
Marina Vargas would say, NOBODY IS IMMUNE to love, death and doubts about faith, and her first solo show in a European museum is about just those themes.
She studied Fine Arts at the University in her home town. She has shown her work in Granada, Seville, Cordoba, Malaga, Milan, New York, Mexico, Monterrey and Havana. She has won prizes such as the INJUVE (Madrid), INJUVE (Malaga), Focus Abengoa (honourable mention), and Iniciarte Creation Grants (Seville), Manuel Rivera, and the grant awarded by the Fundación Antonio Gala, among others.
IMAGE GALLERIES
Portraits of four artists
Inauguration of the exhibitions of the artists Saint Clair Cemin, Marina Vargas, Davinia Jiménez and Paco Guillén.
