A la sombra oscurece antes

Our perceptible reality is heightened when it is not fully day nor fully night; an excess of light dazzles us while its total absence blinds us. It is in twilight when the eye loses its acuity for colours and becomes more receptive to shades. In late summer and early autumn—the time when the works in this exhibition were made—Miguel Marina observed how, nonetheless, for a fleeting moment in the late evening colours shine even more brightly just before they fade away.

In a formal exercise, the artist wanted to focus on the issue of light and shadow, studying the contrasts they give rise to. In this hermeneutics of Painting and under the premise of being able to signify without the need to represent, these works are composed of evoked landscapes, an internalization not necessarily responding to a prior experience outside the painting he is working on. Marina also makes use of certain lingering allusions to classic paintings, like those of Goya or Fra Angelico, ignoring their narrative character in order to focus on how light and shadow take form in the space of the picture. By means of the one same process taken in two opposite directions—manifesting light by taking away dark material, and accomplishing blackness starting out from bright, clear colours—the artist allows himself to follow the fluctuations and forgets the painting’s original motifs. It is the changing light that conditions the process-based becoming of the work.

The objects present in the exhibition are predicated on a purely painterly interest, yet also centred on the question of light. The image of The Floor Scrapers by Gustave Caillebotte resonates in a “floor” piece which is activated through a sound relationship with the spectator. A “step”, also in wood, denotes another spatial reference. There are certain reminiscences that invite the spectator to explore them, to stretch or to bend over. In point of fact, just like the two-dimensional works, they operate as devices that incite movement; as a whole, they take on the resonance of a familiar atmosphere, yet in their individual configuration and arrangement they foreclose any instant access to a common place.

Like what happens in Quest for Fire, 1982, the film in which the characters struggle to keep a flame alive, knowing how to maintain it but not how to light it, with the resulting fears and anxieties it induces, the same can be discerned in It gets dark sooner in the shadows, a search that starts out with light, something that is only intuited but which vanishes during the process of painting.