OPENING 31 JULY IN SANTIAGO.
Keeping a diary - which can foreshadow the emotional whirlwind through the creation of images - has been somehow liberating and revealing because it is only after overcoming the initial numbness and confusion that we become aware of our feelings. I have been exploring this way of narrating, understanding and exposing myself for some time now. It has been a challenge to construct a pictorial language to show myself through anecdotes and ways of representing fantasised emotional realms.
I consider Los que aman nunca pierden [Lovers Never Lose] a continuation of what Ayer y Hoy (2023) - my first solo exhibition - and Proyecto Placebo (2023), my thesis, were. These projects deal with the same issues, but they are different things in the process of building a micro-universe. In such a short career, it is natural that it is not enough to continue studying the same problems or the inevitable and repetitive patterns. Life sometimes seems to be a loop of the same thing, only with different scenarios and characters. This exhibition manifests as a continuity, a second edition of the previous one, with insistence and repetition on this great theme. In the end, I'm just an unrepentant girl in love.
There is no all-or-nothing bipolarity in this series of eight paintings; it is ambivalence, ambiguity and contradiction. It's not about the lesson we learn after overcoming heartbreak but about what the act of loving implies. Because - as far as I have understood it - to love is about being exposed, to be like a fish out of water, to fall off a bicycle and get up again. It is to walk through a field inhabited by not one but four active volcanoes.
It's both sickness and wonder at the same time.
Mara Faúndez, artist.
July 2024.
