An Interview with Mariana De Marchi

Between ‘writer’ and futurism the city that distorts.

The argentine artist Mariana De Marchi from Buenos Aires.
Saturday 4th, August 2012 by Antonio Nazzaro Zambon.



An interview with the argentine artist Mariana De Marchi: The pursuit of assembling the artistic language of the street with the Academy. In her works, the graffiti on the walls are made to shout.

Mariana answers quickly, ‘I portray a reality of the world around me, halfway between the personal and social.’

You see half of her face because her long bang hides the other half. She was born during the years of a dictatorship.
I find her between a website and the telephone wire. In her works, there are clear references to the writer's culture and classical elements, besides the use of her own face as a model explored by scratches. Basically, it’s a distorted city with the life that it contains. The futuristic influence is inevitable for those who paint the city. The graffiti on the walls seem to come out of the head of her characters, transformed into a scream.

Behind the curtain of hair is a smile that seems an oversight: "I have chosen to divide my life in a simple way, to working as a teacher in public schools’ -she explains, while playing with her fingers and looking – ‘and working at my art studio in San Isidro. With my art I seek and I draw my dialogue." Legs crossed, hands -while they move- betray the Italian origin or the Argentine living.

‘I have made some expositions, in the Palais de Glace, in the National Museum of Taiwan, in the Museum of Fine Arts “Benito Quinquela Martín, in the Drawing and Print Museum “Guaman Poma” (Concepción de Uruguay), but generally I’m not involved with the art galleries. The influence of the past still hangs in the artistic world. So I am free to paint with a non-accommodative and unscholarly aesthetic." Mariana has big, curious eyes like many of her characters, brought unfairly near to caricature while they represent a metropolitan life that distorts.

"I have used my face as much as a practical matter, for a lack of other models, yet it lets me see me and my way of seeing'', when she smiles her face gets tense, you can see the character in her eyes. "Maybe that's why my characters blend with their surroundings, even when I use color."

"I am bound to Italy not only by my Italian origins, -second generation- but also for some of their writers like Pavese and Eco. I like to hear readings from the books, and they help me think, removing the mental solitude.” Her face becomes child-like. “Sooner or later, I will have to learn Italian." If the aesthetic is metropolitan, the thought and the reflection are deep and it is an existential and social search for an exit that retains the look in her works.

"Teaching at the public schools have thrown me into violence, marginality, and teenage pregnancy. These things are hard for me. Also with the Menem presidency, art education has been reduced.” She sits down in a chair and looks out from the window.

The characters in Marina De Marci’s work seem imprisoned by the city in which they share the subtle gray designs or the bright colors of the paintings that glow at first sight and then merge into a single deforming light. The symbols used in her series: red moons and fishes indicate a temporary escape, as the possibility of something that can break the daily absurdity of the city. She rises from the chair, leaves the phone and sits back, turns away the bangs and greets me. The phone is left on the table.

Gallery Fifty Six has a large collection of drawings, paintings, and prints by Mariana De Marchi.