THE STRUCTURE OF THE HEART
Ignacio Salazar
The beginning of the millenium. Vertigo and speed kidnap images, which, defenseless against the magnitude of media stimulation, end up transforming themselves into one of the many monsters that serve as a media weapon to vaccinate the ignorant and the distracted with their dangerous proposals to control the careless; they daily anesthetize the conscious until they succeed in melting it into the anonymous masses. This is one of the difficult fields wherein contemporary painting is being developed since, in its most colloquial form, it speaks of images, communication, audience, etc... and painting, given the fact that it is another form of communication and therefore may be included among the media. But painting doesn't operate with ingenuity as its scheme because the media game sets the rules as a strong alliance with technological innovation. Here is where painting becomes marginal in a certain sense, moving to the side of all this noise so as to conserve its existence.
The reasons and arguments of the place that painting occupies in contemporary cultures are the points debated in higher artistic and academic forums; and we wait with submission for the agreements that these forums reach to see if we can understand and not always enter into the mainstream.
In addition, we recognize another facet of the polyhedron, which is the game of opposites, wherein lies the dimensions of calm, timelessness, serenity and, at times, discretion; these are the environment wherein the works that Mariana Escribano has constructed over the last two years are developed.
This group of paintings is comprised with the calm of a miniaturist who collects the colors obtained by mixes of mixes: translucent and opaque, luminous and dark...ordered, two-dimensional gems in an attempt to continue reaching for perfect harmony; the order of feeling; THE VISION, but also the doubt, this doubt that attracts because it brings the secret ever closer to the intangible. We don't know what this grouping of squares, rectangles or stains is saying or what they wish to say. What does it mean? How can we translate these paintings? Could it be that the ineffable has a place before the doubts and that it presents us with the opportunity to be able to enjoy these kaleidoscopic structures that Mariana Escribano has taken up as the center of her creative process? Or, to the contrary, does it speak of the compositional eloquence of each one of these paintings and of its musicality that make sense together with the complicated chromatic mixes found in the reticulated forms, which appear only as rigorous, ordered sequences but that soon after observing them become organic, flexile and playful? Mariana, or better yet- her heart, appears in each painting, and wins us over with the heart that the good paintig possesses. This is the most important of all. As William Faulkner said, "when art looses its heart, it losses everything." I believe Mariana's work has much heart.