MARGARITA GARCIA FAURE

I cannot imagine a painting that, when its conception is moved through time, produces a gap between the maker's internal clock and the time represented by the work itself. But I can still present the following theory: painting is a genre in constant jet lag. It has its own time zone that either delays or pushes ahead its contemporaneity. This hypothesis could be complemented by a state of the question that could be interpreted as common ground: in 1958 the Boeing 707 was manufactured; Jasper Johns had his first solo exhibition in Leo Castelli and Lucio Fontana moved from holes to slashes with a knife on canvas, and from the sixties onwards a paradigm shift occurred in which the artist went from invention (being a creator of new images) to editing (being an attentive consumer of his time). In other words, painting finds itself in a temporal limbo between the past and the future, as well as in a conceptual limbo between the invention (whose vehicle will always come from the individual’s field) and the search beyond the frame (the artist feeding on his context and giving an account of it). To recapitulate therefore, if the painting manages to dissect a precise slice from these limbos, it could be the eye of the storm of a specific - and only possible - present moment; a present that unfolds in a centrifugal way towards the past and the future, the individual and the contextual, the invention and the edition. Perhaps, in that ubiquitous moment of perception that it gives us, it is we who are in a state of jet lag.

Meanwhile could be an instant of the immense present, or a minimal floating state. Meanwhile by Margarita García Faure is a set of latent images - they are alive, but at the same time they seem to be in a constant state of creation between the void and the final image, and they have the inherent energy necessary for their substance to transform. The works are produced between two trips of pictorial exploration: one in Antarctica and the other in the Mexican desert. Each of these trips has its own series, and Meanwhile is that hybrid and complex selection that sits in between these two moments of the artist - each characterized by the absorption of a large amount of new information and a strong period of production. Meanwhile is a limbo between the ice and the desert, and if this temporal haven were given a space dimension - Entre()tanto (which translates as ‘between’ and ‘so much’) - we are then faced with a quantitative as well as internal process of editing and merging. This is how, from an intimate narrative, Margarita’s series stops at the epicentre of the hurricane, where everything around it doesn’t stop moving. From its individual account, her paintings touch current questions of painting: those being temporality, invention and the reflection of the context.

Margarita's slashes not only allude to the moment when Lucio Fontana opened a clear-cut space within the painting's dimension, but they initially have a practical reason for being: its holes allowed the Antarctic wind to pass through the canvas. Painting is not just about painting: it is a machine which captures what is outside the frame, a web that catches the wind and traces of the elements. In this way Margarita asks herself about the effects of time and context in the work. And those slashes, which are repeated as if through an automatic gesture, and yet appear manmade and expressive, merge with the opposite in search of the limbo. Depth and shadows are combined with monochrome silver, gold or copper backgrounds. The fabric not only opens to what is behind and beyond, and towards the context in which it was produced, but it also refracts forward; they are light sources that seek to invade the exhibition space. The painting becomes alive at the moment at which it is perceived, where the iridescent colour ranges change their property in unison with the movement of the viewer. In turn, these monochromes contain a story: they are the blinding light that bounces off the snow, the light of the desert and why not also an alchemy of time that traveled from the silver mines and the Mexican golden idols to the surface of the contemporary shine or the spatial light of a painting projected by super eight film. They are light and shadow materialized in a double-sided fabric made object; it is a performance-painting reflecting the desert light and enveloping people; it is a pictorial machine that registers the natural phenomena of Antarctica. Painting is no longer just painting, it is temporality, edition, invention, context, object and body.

And in between these experiences that dethrone the realm of bidimensionality, between what bounces outwards and what the interior proposes beyond, there is an affective geological cut, a limbic slice just at the right moment - nebular somewhat - of a moving figure in formation. This series - which is carried out between trips with many records of nature; between metabolic moments of information, editing and production and with various elements interwoven in limbos - does not seek confusion but generosity. The artist shares her sensation simply by hoping for all of us to be able to construct new images from the proposed context as we look at the contemporary in a state of jet lag.

Javier Villa, October 2012.