Aquelarre
Solo show by Marina Roca Díe
Aquelarre
Solo show by Marina Roca Díe
19 July 2022 - 22 August 2021
Credits
Elena Feduchi
Painting as witchcraft
The painter as a witch
Oil as a sacrificial mean
Witches Sabbath is a series of works made between 2017 and 2019, shown for the first time in this exhibition. The series is conformed by works on paper –pencil, oil and sanguine– and oil on canvas, and has the witches as its subject. The witch plays an important role in Marina's work for its symbolic meaning but also because of how it has been used throughout history –including the history of art– to give an icon to the darkness, to the different. Today, as far away as we are from a society governed by religion, we can continue to express our fear of the unknown through these women who, beyond having had hidden powers or not, they represented society's terror of what cannot be controlled but above all, of what cannot be understood. In these works it is important to make a distinction between singular and plural as we are talking about spells that are possible through a community: the witches.
Art has the capacity – magical or supernatural – to be a mirror of humanity; if Goya used witches to hide his own fears, Marina uses them to express what is absurd today, just as he did during the Inquisition. Through feminism, philosophy and, to a very important extent, psychoanalysis, the witches in Witches Sabbath can tell us stories from centuries ago that are repeated here and today. From this perspective, it is very likely that the painter is not the real author, but only a medium. On the other hand, painting is always a sort of spell that conjures in each one who sees it, that spell is not finished until we get to commune with it, author and viewer.
Marina's work investigates the body, its carnal and symbolic forms using the interstices between the figure and its disappearance. Like several painters of her generation, the distinction between figurative and abstract is futile to understanding her work, these distinctions are not the end but only the means. These bodies that we see have no definition, they steal elements from tradition to stick together in ecstatic movements that which the artist tries to imitate when facing the canvas. The violence and the joy of movement, the ecstasy of the Sabbath and its translation from the hand to the canvas.
Art has the capacity – magical or supernatural – to be a mirror of humanity; if Goya used witches to hide his own fears, Marina uses them to express what is absurd today, just as he did during the Inquisition. Through feminism, philosophy and, to a very important extent, psychoanalysis, the witches in Witches Sabbath can tell us stories from centuries ago that are repeated here and today. From this perspective, it is very likely that the painter is not the real author, but only a medium. On the other hand, painting is always a sort of spell that conjures in each one who sees it, that spell is not finished until we get to commune with it, author and viewer.
Marina's work investigates the body, its carnal and symbolic forms using the interstices between the figure and its disappearance. Like several painters of her generation, the distinction between figurative and abstract is futile to understanding her work, these distinctions are not the end but only the means. These bodies that we see have no definition, they steal elements from tradition to stick together in ecstatic movements that which the artist tries to imitate when facing the canvas. The violence and the joy of movement, the ecstasy of the Sabbath and its translation from the hand to the canvas.
