Texto en inglés: La persistencia del arte, sobre la obra de Matilde Marín en la Galería Sicart de Barcelona

The persistence of ART

The mechanism of perception that leads Matilde Marín to find, again and again, the word ART on her trips, start with a calligraphy poster, nearly a photography manual, in 1998 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This is nothing less than which holds "La vérité Changera l' Art". Gives beginning to a series still open, captured by her camera, presented in casual, random and arbitrary manner, confirming the widespread use in multiple contexts of the word ART, verified in her travels.

To that first one, that associated the truth as a driver of change in a system that is identified with a capital letter, followed many others who were visualized not necessarily within a cultural center, but on the street, in advertisements, as nominating a coffee, in the patent of the 40’s typical cars from Cuba, in the t-shirt of a girl in the middle of a performance or as a graffiti in an classic arch in Rome.

Art is a word that contains multiple meanings and is being redefined all the time. But that multiplicity has contact points and varied connections. Persisting from classical antiquity, associated with a certain virtue or ability to do or produce something, but it certainly should maintain a status of technical mastery of craft. Plato speaks of doing something with art or without art and the expression soon resulted not only in the physical, but also in the production of ideas and the intelligentsia. For Aristotle, the scale would be: art, science, practical knowledge, philosophy and intuitive reason. But he insists on a certain particular difference when he quotes art: "Art is about something that becomes. Art is not about what is a necessity or what can not be other than what it is", process that makes visible - it has to be a realization by a method - of something that erupts, manifesting as an act with high valuation. Remains in the Latin term ARS associated with a knowledge production that could be located within the so-called crafts. The term liberal arts (trivium, quadrivium) in an equivalent sense to "knowledge".

But the change happens with some names that we recognize as true innovators in the 20th. Century. Following anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, who said: "Anthroposophists can be the ones who feel certain questions about the nature of man and the world as a vital necessity as the one felt when we are hungry and thirsty," the German artist Joseph Beuys broadens the conception of art towards the relationship with life itself. Quoting his master here referred, calls to consider every human being as an artist, every action as a work of art that can be both ephemeral both as an impetus for reflection. The concept then expands and leaves open paths to obsolescence of previously sustained hierarchies. It is a profound change - and somehow - extended and incorporated to the universal culture in the scheme of contemporary art.

What causes Matilde Marín to deploy this series of photographic captures where the sense of the word art allows us to contextualize some meanings? Her own questions, concerns about the possibility of every trip that always involves the idea of comparison with other systems, what they have in common and how they are distinct. This, along with the imprint of the search emerges as powerful and significant in its perception as a contemporary artist. It can be traced in her production the series of lighthouses, the one related to smoke, the ones on crisis and survival modes, common to multiple systems in many different countries together. But that ability that Matilde runs with critical evidence, or what is the same: observe aesthetically a reality that is 'out there' in front, makes us witnesses of a common set of devices within the differences, something which returns to the concept by Beuys quoted, the look that transforms the action into a work of art, at once ephemeral as all these shots, but that clearly indicate an impulse to reflect where we all have a creative ability that transforms our actions into something done with art.

Pilar Altilio