Marin's enchanted forests
By Margaret Failoni (June 2, 2006)

Marin with one of her works in progress] On Wednesday, June 7, a group of San Miguel de Allende collectors and friends are traveling into Mexico City to attend Mari José Marin's exhibition of recent paintings and sculpture at the prestigious GAM-Galeria de Arte Mexicana.

Born in Mexico City, Mari José Marin moved to San Miguel a little over 15 years ago.

We have followed this artist's career during 13 years since we first became familiar with her work. In the early stages of her career, her paintings tended to be bucolic landscapes with swaying palms or desert growths emerging from a sea of tropical vegetation. Beautiful mixed-media works on handmade paper were accented by deep green agaves on a silver-leaf ground or silhouetted organpipe cacti painted on gold-leaf. No tension in these works; very pretty, very decorative and very collectable. Some of her works from this period have been included with those of other Mexican landscape artists in itinerant exhibitions that traveled to museums in the United States and Europe.

From this phase, we followed her to the gigantic trees: lushly painted cypresses, rich black elms on a crimson red ground, oils painted on canvas, or the beautiful studies of trees: oils on handmade paper accompanied by beautiful, hand-written verses. Marin is also an accomplished poet.

Tension in the world and in our personal lives has not spared the art community, and Marin's work has undergone some major changes in recent years-most definitely for the best. She continues to paint trees, using color in a masterly manner, but the imagery has become starker and ever more minimal. There is drama and pathos to be seen here. She has pushed the boundary so far that the work has taken on a Zen-like quality leading to a very personalized and poetic, almost ethereal image of woods. Spare and minimal trees grow from a dense ground, rich in color and matter. Backgrounds sometime take on a misty quality as if the trees are floating. Some trees are glazed in silver or gold, and a thin mist washes over them, making them appear ever more ethereal. The trees become more sculptural, stripped as they are of leaves and branches. They become smooth, ghostly, phallic images. To enhance this Zen-like effect, they become even more sculptural when covered in thin layers of silver or gold, a field of fire energizing around them.

In Marin's sculptures, the step from the picture plane to three dimensions becomes a forgone conclusion. These ethereal images have slid off the canvas to take on a life of their own. From the world of mist, they have taken on a bold demeanor. The sculptures are smooth, gold leaf on wood, hands on, even more phallic. These tree groups have a grand appearance, one or two trees appear to sway and almost whisper "touch me" sensually.

They invite a caress and have enabled the artist to come full circle, back to the almost bucolic and very collectable homage to the landscape.



... and transcendent trees
By Peter Leventhal

What makes the move in an artistic career, let us say, from the expected to the unexpected? In what moment does the artist, when it happens, if it does happen, produce transcendent images? When before the images, no matter how beguiling, or even moving, held fast to the prosaic, what turns them into the deepest and most significant aspect of art-making, that which takes us out of ourselves?

To us, the sense of cosmic destiny brings with it a solace that is the last and lasting solace we can hold to.
We simply cannot say. Magic pervades art. What comes to us as artists is always a gift. We enter the profession as seekers, with an obdurate will to make it ours. When it comes to us, it is because our will has cracked, because of fatigue, or frustration or affliction.

In that moment some presentiment arrives from a place that is not ours. It fixes in our work, giving us opportunity. 
The tree figures in the work of Mari José Marin are the locus of her imagery. Her trees have always had a totemic quality. They are the trees of the clan Mari Marin. Somewhere, somehow, in the last few years, these totemic trees have been distilled into images in which the essence becomes more potent. The images confront us with their strange power, accept us into their scheme of adhering all the aspects of living a life in a single form: sickness and hope, the void of comprehension and sudden universal insight, memory and forgetfulness. Something came as a gift to Mari José Marin and changed her work into a compelling, expressive enterprise.

I am not an aficionado of the reductive. Some might look at the progression of Marin's trees and say she has stripped them, or reduced them to their essence, but I look and say she has internalized what was outside. When it was outside it had a decorative profession. Inside, it has an expressive intention of phenomenal power. And now there is no longer inside or outside in these images, but a seamless potent scheme of singular fused events.


Paintings and sculpture by Mari José Marin, Wednesday, June 7, 6-9pm
GAM/Galeria de Arte Mexicano, General Rafael Rebollar, 47
Col. S. Miguel Chapultepec, Mexico, D.F.