"[Women are] a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually".
Virginia Woolf
In this exhibition, Mara Faúndez opens the doors to spaces of intimacy, vulnerability and reverie. Through memory, she unveils an imaginary of everyday objects, domestic interiors and landscapes of where she grew up, which intersect with the longing, often frustrated, for an idyllic space. The artist places figures, indifferent to the gaze, absorbed in a suspended time, in familiar but strangely contained scenes; their bodies overflow the space as if nothing relevant were happening outside its boundaries. As they reveal themselves, the elements participate in ambiguous atmospheres; an affective and ethereal landscape and an everyday life flooded with small disturbances, all under a veil of pastel colours.
To confront the paintings on display is inevitably to confront the body. The scale of the figures, which from the canvas tend to reflect our own, is the first invitation to participate in the image. The bodies with lost eyes inhabit the space, make it small and intimate, and enclose it; like a spatial self-absorption that corresponds to an affective self-absorption. The artist presents the body as an exercise in self-knowledge, honesty and vulnerability from her own position as a woman, confronting the idea of self-image and subjectivity. But she also engages in a dialogue with the complexities and contradictions of the female nude in the history of art; the imposition of a lustful gaze and the ambiguity of the erotic and the introspective.
The artist's approach to her production is to paint from memory rather than direct observation; she also constantly draws on literary, musical, cinematographic and artistic references, which is reflected in the highly subjective nature of it. In this sense, there is an important relationship between the affective charge of the images and the behaviour of objects and nature. The almost inexpressive faces of the subjects do not give much indication of a particular state of mind; however, the moderation of these figures is illusory and, in reality, only shifts the visibility of the passions outwards. They are located in space, in hidden messages, stormy landscapes, dried flowers or empty cups, rehearsing a series of contemporary still lifes that make up the symbolic density of the artist's imaginary.
Ayer y Hoy [Yesterday and Today] suggests a dual temporality. On the one hand, it evokes the kind of encapsulated, introspective, spiritual time typical of memory and nostalgia; a landscape, a soft light, a romance, an idealised image. But it is also a time of the mundane, the routine, the repetitive, a time of boredom and lethargy, but also of hedonism and ephemeral pleasures, embodied in a series of recurring objects, such as the cigarettes, reminiscent of Philip Guston. Mara Faúndez's work features the past and the present, the spiritual and the mundane; it configures a pictorial diary of life, narrated by a female voice, and requires the viewer to look at the seemingly insignificant.
There is a satirical attitude in the insistence on depicting dreamy places and serene spaces adorned and covered in soft colours that fabricate innocent appearances and images of romanticised nostalgia. In reality, there is always a degree of pessimism or conflict in these images. Sometimes, the window frame offers a place of respite, an attempt to protect a small domestic space, the beloved room of one's own, from the storm; at other times, the truly unsettling takes place within. But Mara Faúndez also sometimes gives us the immensity of a dizzying universe, serenely contained within a tenderly rounded horizon.
Vicenta Larraín Vogel, artist and curator.
September 2023.
