Cibrián is delighted to present Un jardín, a solo exhibition by Marina González Guerreiro at the gallery.
Un jardín (a garden) acts like a recollection of Marina González Guerreiro’s various interests, spanning across sculptures, azulejos, paintings, and mixed media collages, created at different moments of her career.
In his essay The Garden in Motion, gardener and landscape architect Gilles Clément redefines the garden not as a static environment, but rather places where observation is key and where nature takes its course. Clément’s modus operandi is to let things happen with minimum intervention, often in overlooked places such as neglected land. Un jardín, and more generally Marina González Guerreiro’s body of work, echoes such places. The multitude of gestures, textures, and shapes seem to work in symbiosis to create a unique environment carefully monitored by the artist but never overworked. The artist’s practice, akin to an ecosystem growing differently every day, invites the viewer to delve into its multiplicity.
Childhood runs through Marina González Guerreiro’s work, as she patiently takes it in. Not in a simplistic or frivolous fashion, but as a source that holds the material for another reality, a little off the anthropocentric gaze. A question arises whilst looking at the notebook pages and empty diary entries displayed here and there by the artist: What does it really mean to write to your future self? The small altarpieces painted in a reduced palette of color, ceramic compositions adorned with drawings of natural elements, early paintings, sculptures with found objects, water, paper, rice, etc.—all those heterogeneous elements appear as some of the answer. They are aspirations, ephemeral refuges left in plain sight. The artist, a future self, uses those elements as conductive, capable of reconciling two temporalities from which she is equally drawn.
In a time in which provincialism is being reevaluated within the art sphere, it wouldn’t be incongruous to talk about Marina González Guerreiro’s geographical isolation. Her extreme attention to details and keen observation might be informed by this isolation and proximity to nature. This is an inherent part of her work, of course, but a more complex set of meanings is at play, inviting the viewer to engage with it, almost mapping it. The tension between the sophistication of a language (its jargon, its audience, etc.) and the fragile interpretation of the ordinariness is central in Marina González Guerreiro’s work, where something seems to unravel with every glance yet gains unexpected importance. A pear falling, the representation of the breeze, wind vanes, etc. Marina González Guerreiro shows a continuous return to the moment when a decision is made, a suspension of time.