Carmen Marin - Representations of liminal memory

The year 2024 is marked, in the field of art and culture in Romania, by the presence of Carmen Marin’s artworks. Awarded nationally and internationally, with an impressive record of appreciation from art critics and personalities in the world of culture, the artist exhibits at WIN Gallery a series of works that amplify and extend her exhibition "Absences. Being in Empty Space" from the National Museum of Contemporary Art. Simultaneously, Carmen Marin is also present in the Iberian Peninsula in a related exhibition in Marbella, alongside paintings by Constantin Pacea, all three events being clear demonstrations of her stature as an international artist.

Memory of absence or ipseity of presence?

Thematically, the artworks created by Carmen Marin bring to the viewers' attention an often cold, claustrophobic imagery, which through their chromatics and dynamics manage to capture precisely the visual uncertainty of memories that we all face. This dialectic manages to condense easily through the artist's talent and work, the result being one in which we can see representations of the self's reclusion, an in rem siege where the memory of absence has the power to both evoke and invoke powerful visual elements.

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MISANTHROPY and Cezanne's Patches, acrylic / linen, 60x80 cm, 2022

The shades of blue used by Carmen Marin open the represented spaces like windows, offering through contrast an alternative which, in many of the works, can induce the idea of hope or innocence. We can see this in The Chair II, Misanthropy or perhaps, best of all, in Between Presence and Absence. The latter work depicts the image of an armchair that stands out through its colours, and which, like an overexposed photograph on film where the light-flooded window is intuited by a few lines, brings to the present act of observation multiple memories associated with the piece of furniture. This effect is common to her works, most having this power to stimulate memory precisely through the absence of precise elements.

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THE CHAIR II acrylic/ linen, 170x70 cm, 2020
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BETWEEN PRESENCE AND ABSENCE acrylic/ linen, 130x130 cm, 2024

At the same time, the presences in her paintings haunt the space oneirically, suggesting restless presences, some that seem aware of the viewer, others doomed to be viewed or caught in various instances of their alienation. We find these instances in paintings like The Key, The Chair, The Cloud or Rumination (Green and blue). Disturbing and ambiguous bodies, they nevertheless speak clearly about current issues of identity and rediscovery in present times, placing Carmen Marin in the category of artists who manage to convey through their works the feelings that belong to the actuality of our days.

The liminal imaginary

A very important note on the artworks created by Carmen Marin is their placement in the area of syncretic expressionism. If the expressionist valences themed in accordance with personal elements, as well as with the artist's contemporaneity, are evident - syncretism is revealed by bringing together psychological and psychologizing elements that transgress her personal sphere towards the universal, intersecting along the way the personal experiences of all those who come into contact with her paintings. Worth mentioning here are the literary interventions of Porfirio Rodriguez, which come to formally support the syncretic expressionism manifested through overcoming the limits of plastic language towards a work with multiple connections in various media.

This syncretic expressionism is strongly identified by the emotions rendered and their representational depth marks for Carmen Marin, a solid positioning in the area of an imaginary that is in a constant state of composition, decomposition and recomposition. The perpetual process produces a liminal imaginary in which the artist's journey is the destination itself, her oneiric explorations enjoying the lack of desire to wake up. Such searches emerge directly from works like Beyond the Window, Presence and Patches of Light. One can observe how the gravity of the figured elements attracts us through mystery, through the almost instantaneous generation of questions - things that contribute to the works' ability to stimulate the search for answers at the viewer's level.

In this way, a liminal imaginary is delimited, which Carmen Marin navigates gracefully, with confident brushstrokes and dreamlike backgrounds. This liminal space possesses characteristics that transform her works into ambiguous aesthetic zones for the viewer, in which personal and transpersonal states are induced that qualify the interpretative approaches as insufficient and even unnecessary, a beneficial thing, meant to calibrate rather the emotional load and the intimate character of the experience proposed by the artist's paintings.

Therefore, the question-answer dynamic remains as powerful as it is subtle, like a current that strikes us, that slams doors or windows noisily, or that carries us out to sea. The absurd becomes a source of truth, as the artist herself claims, and the current of this dynamic convinces us to give up the formal limitations of facile interpretations in order to search for that essential and ineffable "something" already present in us and rendered in Carmen Marin's work in the form of a metaphorical mirror like the painting The Threshold of the Mirror.

Ph.D. Researcher Andrei FĂȘIE

THE TRESHOLD OF THE MIRROR acrylic / linen, 90x70 cm, 2023

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