With Carmen Marin's new personal exhibition, WIN Gallery invites you to venture "Beyond the Ordinary" into an exhilarating, challenging and rewarding voyage from survival to joie de vivre.
All lives are, to a certain extent, built around and in the spirit of the ordinary. Routines, norms, repetitions, conventions, chronologies are ways to structure the immensity and overwhelming character of existence, to find pattern and reason. The ordinary is generalizable. It is reliable, predictable, absolutely necessary to mankind yet insufficient to man.
The uniqueness of the individual is predicated upon the courage to seek what lies beyond the ordinary, in the ability to escape from the mundane into the irregular and the exceptional, to alternate functional objectivity with subjective reverie. It is perhaps the most challenging (self) exploratory voyage - the one from survival to "joie de vivre”.
Carmen Marin has a striking, spell-binding way of capturing this struggle in her paintings. They are autobiographical, in part. They are also highly relatable, evoking a sense of familiarity, an intuitive connection to their meaning as if entering a shared space of mind, one that crosses the personal without obliterating it.
Tributary to Expressionism, she brings forth the intensity of emotion and thought that defy appearances and oversimplified "realities". The focus shifts from the unitary to the amalgamated nature of ideas. Each work is a composite, a set of layered stories and images imprinted in memory.
Carmen Marin masterfully uses illusion to invite the viewer beyond the obvious and the momentary. Easily recognizable, day to day articles of use (e.g. tables, chairs) are often placed in the center of her works but the attentive spectator will notice they are not grounded or stable but rather inscribed in a fantastic, imponderable world of characters and disparate scenes. It is as if they are there to "call to mind", to act as a Proustian madeleine, to reconstruct based not on the present but on the kind of past that endures the passage of years and eras.
Memory is lace. We recall and recount cutouts of ourselves and time. Intricate and ornate details connect to each other like threads of life and identity. Yet, the deepness of being is not be found there but in the wholes of the lace, where thoughts and feelings, dreams and defeats flow and melt into each other, where now and then become one.
There is no name, no definition orrepresentation for these missing parts that remain obscure and nevertheless so relevant. All there is to grasp is their state - a relative absence and paradoxically an intangible presence. It is not accidental that Carmen Marin's parallel exhibition organized by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest is titled “Absences".
Is this to say that all seen and have awareness of is superficial and artificial? No, just incomplete. Just a reminder of the blessing it is to forget. Just a brilliant limitation to avoid the tragic fate of Irineo Funes, the fictional character molded by Borges into the man who remembers all things, equalizes them all and in so doing annihilates them all.
In "Beyond the Ordinary", WIN Gallery takes this confluence of presences and absences one step further by juxtaposing it with related and interdependent themes including: the freedom of thought and its limitations, the interplay between object and subject of observation and the inwardoutward continuum that characterizes the mystical search for the essence of things and being.
The aesthetic alchemy proposed by Carmen Marin is not primarily preoccupied with the transformation of the ordinary into the sublime but with the grace that prevails when "learning" to see its role and relation to the rest. Ironically, it is what makes the extraordinary distinguishable, desirable and sometimes perhaps reachable.
Cristian Pascu - Patron of the Arts
Irina Stoenescu - Chairlady
Catalin Gurita-Manole - Director of Experience
