Marina Iglesias, Nocturna, Demonio o Flor
12 March – 23 April 2021, Tuesday to Friday

According to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck, our way of experiencing historical time can be explained by means of two opposing concepts. The first of them is the “space of experience”, which refers to that recent or remote past that accompanies us today and that collaborates in the construction of our memories and our memory; the second, the “horizon of expectation”, which refers to what has not yet happened, what has not yet been experienced, what can only be imagined and, if necessary, discovered. It is in that window open to expectation that fantasy and hope in the not-yet-real, but possible, appear. The works that Marina Iglesias presents in her first solo show at the Tuesday to Friday gallery propose a non-linear, non-chronological journey between the two temporal universes through painting.

Nocturna, demonio o flor tells us about the multiplicity of historical times and about the way in which we imagine time through a constant negotiation between the past and the future; a negotiation whose consequences are experienced and materialized in the present. Notwithstanding, the “space of experience”, the stories about the past, where Iglesias’ work unfolds, are not those of the most well-known history (of art), but rather those of a story that has not yet been told. What we find in the paintings and sculptures presented here are those “lapses in the syntax” of which Michel de Certeau spoke, that is, events or experiences from our collective past that “have become unthinkable for a new identity to be thinkable ”. Marina Iglesias tries to remind us how those lapses in history, those dark and unknown episodes that we think are forgotten, always end up coming back. And they do it in an underground and furtive way, insinuating themselves “on the shores and in the flaws of discourse”, through the (in)visible, the unsaid, which reappears through painting.

This always dialectical flow of historical progression is evidenced by the artist through the contrast of references from multiple historical sources. The motifs included in Nocturna, demonio o flor remind us of mythological beings, medieval miniatures, anthologies or botanical codices. The meticulous, critical and attentive attention that Iglesias devotes to investigating and selecting each of these historical references is what allows her to demonstrate the survival of forms, contents and emotions of the past through images. Nevertheless, when we look at her works, there is something about them that is familiar to us; they transport us to a place in the past that, in any case, we cannot pinpoint. And we cannot because the images that the artist incorporates from a cumulative and, in part, unconscious search, are not limited to coexisting in the same two-dimensional space in an unaltered and reliable way, but when they appear they modify each other, just as the tracks of a musical sampler would. The resulting pictorial universe acquires, in this way, an illusory and magical tone that is, however, extremely real.

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