Text of the exhibition "Maribel Nazco. Recent Paintings" in GALERÍA ATC, written by Isidro Hernández, TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Curator. The exhibition can be visited until November 10.
Maribel Nazco's painting is dominated, throughout her extensive career, by a decidedly experimental character that has allowed her to open different series and configure discourses and innovative proposals without moving away from the same expressive quality. Her painting, always attentive to the assembly, the object and the urban, has been unfolding and turning on itself in a wide variation of motifs that have remained faithful, however, to the same language or to the same way of facing the pictorial fact. In fact, the determination and violence of the works from the early 1990s, Icons of the City, remain intact in the more recent series, Garden of Debris, as both return to the experimental impulse of her previous metallic work, showing, thus, a coherence that never ceases to surprise us. In these paintings by Maribel Nazco, on which she has been working for the last three years, we witness an accumulation of color and sediments, as if it were the sum of her life experience, as if the firm stroke of her brush held the fragile balance of everything that seeks permanence.
In these paintings the protagonists are fragments that gravitate in a contained suspension; they are forms in disorder that reconcile and repel each other, that approach and move away in a delicate descent towards a known and yet ignored territory. The rounded profiles give way, the diaphanous backgrounds become cloudy; the reality of things, so obvious, becomes light and elusive. The stones liquefy and transform into clouds of glassy vapor; The darts and arrows, once luminous and graceful in the hands of the hero, now accurately strike the target of the world. And it is in that furious and excessive tension where we recognize the strength of her pictorial language, always in motion and restless, violent and non-conformist, capable of engaging in irresolvable conflicts. Darts, spears, stones, clouds or arrows; all the elements that come together in these latest paintings by Maribel Nazco are nothing more than magnetic fields in which opposing forces play that, at the same time, complement each other in a continuous source of attraction and repulsion; that of a Nature that is generated uncontrollably and, at the same time, degrades irreversibly.
Nothing more unusual than stones gravitating and arrows appearing fossilized and rusty in their target. Nothing more subversive than trying to translate, through pictorial procedures, this disagreement with the future of the current world, with advances that, incomprehensibly, cause irreparable damage to its voracious progress. Hence the evanescent impulses of this last painting, its brief shocks of extreme tension, where dreaminess and lucidity meet face to face.
Isidro Hernández
Curator, TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes
