Rest and Breathing

Rest and Breath, Utopias and Ruins Series, 2020, Acrylic cement and copper and fabric tape on canvas, 160cm x 80cm. __ The city and its grammar. Its syntax of haste, its coming-and-going connected to the lines of an urban organisation, its metro system; the abyss that is established between us. The city in its continuous flux aims at a progress without attention, and it is once again to the reverse of this movement that Marina Rodrigues launches herself in the series "Utopias and Ruins". A new approach in her work, a kind of rupture of continuity, where the new is added to an obstinate research; a new layer on her Tape Art and her urban geometrization. Like someone crossing São Paulo in 2020, and questioning where this flow is going, Marina collects the rumour of the street: newspapers, old magazines and written traces of our time start to incorporate her canvases. Much more than the insertion of an everyday object, which at a quick intuition already reminds us of the cubism of Picasso and George Braque, the artist calls upon the memory, or even the silencing of these objects, condemned to perish, since even news has its progress. If before we spoke of a sensitive geometry in her work, today we can already speak of a kind of critical geometry. Critical, in the sense that it does not abstain from its aesthetic potency, at the same time as it begins to dialogue with new elements; and this dialogue is political, and is conceptual. Her gesture translates this profoundly existential aspect: the present is the time of coexistence with echoes, the voice left over from the past and the uncertain rumour of the future, it is the agonising time and the only active one. Marina overlaps them, pays homage to this geometric polis and summons up the sensitivity of impermanence. Her gesture alludes to our time, the worn-out newspapers, the imperative of order: a time in which any promise of utopia can only be the archaeology of our ruins.