Why do Javier Marín's sculptures produce enthusiasm in the viewer who in front of them cannot help but sketch a very slight smile of satisfaction? What is the power of attraction that they awaken? Where does that concentrating force that draws the viewer's attention come from? Why have these clay figures caused a stir in an area where sculpture receives discriminatory treatment with respect to other forms of plastic expression? What is the explanation for the amazing event?
Answering these — and many more — questions that we ask ourselves when “seeing” Javier Marín's sculptures cannot and should not be an automatic operation. Faced with phenomena of a similar nature, in fact infrequent, it is necessary to walk with lead feet to avoid falling into unexpected clumsiness that only confuse and divert attention from the essential, from what is substantive and fair that seems to be evident in the work of an author young, still in the formative stage, whose virtuosity is beyond any doubt. Javier Marín's work enchants, and the fascination that excites the spirits of both the furtive observer and the severe and cold critic give the impression of coinciding, which makes one think of the emergence of a promising artist, with enormous potential, on whom one must meditate with the greatest serenity possible.
Here success matters little to us, because success - as Rilke would say - is just a misunderstanding. What is true comes from the work, from what is implicit in it. In any case, attempting an aesthetic judgment implies recognizing the author's intention and penetrating, through his work, in the sense of the creative act, in the revelation of the plastic values that he radiates, in the foundations that sustain it, in the power evocative that transmits and in the maturation of the genius that makes it possible.
In Marín's work, the need to capture the human body in motion is evident. In all his sculptures the unsatisfied desire to freeze certain moments, certain situations and gestures, certain attitudes and winks that, when imprinted on the figures, point to the discovery of a language without concealment, recharged at times, meek and submissive at others, is evident. , but a language that does not deny the defined invoice of the person who formulates it. Body in motion - understood as a generic feature of his work - is privileged above any other plastic value. Such exclusivity must be attributed to the fact that an idea of man is the object of his art, configuring something like a physics of expression from which he structures the whole of the work he has produced up to now.
His sculptures are materialized images, images that lack support in natural reality: they do not copy or imitate — nor do they pretend to do so — an original. Proof of this is that Javier Marín works with a model. His express intention is of another nature: he reproduces over and over again, with few variations, his conception, his way of imagining man. It could almost be said that Javier ran into a flash of lightning in his walk along the paths of art that illuminated the angle of a fantastic representation and, spontaneously surrendered to his intuition, began the upward march towards the structuring of a now unmistakable personality.
In his sculptural work there is a subtle definition of the spaces where the imaginary characters unfold. The sculptures are not modeled to occupy a place, rather they are formators, creators of the spaces they occupy: they go from an enigmatic and intimate interior to a founding exterior of the scenography that it contains. As dancers, the contortion and the corporal expression barely hint at the place where the act takes place, and the sole suggestion is already the one that supports as a spell the spatial structure where the representation takes place, whether circus or circus. of a dramatic epic sense or of a farce of comic humor. But the creative operation of space in Marín's work is chimerical, spontaneous, and simple in nature, which rather aims to go to meet the illusory, without the intervention of an intellectual will inclined to rationalizing abstraction. Its secret lies in offering itself without more or more, as a gift, as a position on the visual horizon with a deliberate ornamental and decorative intention. That is why without having the purpose of exciting sophistic thought, these sculptures manage to captivate the artificial man, subjugated by the geometric perfection and the univocal and precise consistency of the algorithm and of the functional and utilitarian spaces.
Some critics suggest that Marín's work draws on classical antiquity and the Renaissance to raise his particular aesthetic vision; however, that seems inaccurate to me. A Greek like Phidias or a Renaissance like Michelangelo would have noticed fundamental deficiencies in Marín's torsos, because these simply and simply cannot be framed within the naturalistic scheme subsumed in classical aesthetics. Classical perfection also tries to elevate nature to the Olympic domain, and Renaissance sculpture seeks to fix the transcendence of the human in marble or bronze, and in this sense the works have a strong pious character. Marín's sculptures, on the contrary, strip the human body of any religious mask, remove any halo of divinity, and their bodies are as earthly as the clay of which they are composed: they are pieces of temporary fragility, mere instants of a furtive dawn and immediate dissolution.
The disturbing eroticism that their figures radiate conforms to a tradition that paradoxically lacks any tradition, that ignores all past and distrusts any future. These works are the product of a nihilistic, impoverished, consumerist society, sclerotic by the novelty that never ends up satisfying them. That world of disbelievers of which we are all a part, suddenly faces an imaginary, illusory portrait with no other support than a cast cement base, with no other function than to remember the deliquescence of our passions, finally as ethereal and insignificant as the sigh of always being on the verge of cracking and fatal disintegration. That is why clay works in these pieces that sometimes look like bronzes or more perennial materials, but they are nothing more than structures of burnt earth, weak figures about to crumble and that in this they carry their power and their truth, because they allude to insecurity. of our actuality, because they show us our insignificance, our reality as cosmic bodies of an unprecedented smallness.
Marín is a sculptor determined to pulverize the greatness of the myth-forging athletic body, and rather, uncovers the limitation, puts in suspense and before our eyes places the tragic Hamletian fate of contemporary man threatened by his own destructive impulses. It is clay, the poorest of the mediums, the oldest and most fragile, the material that most faithfully expresses the fleetingness of existence, the closest medium that we have used to leave testimony of our passage through the earth, and which Marín has used to take his place in the art world.
