Mariana Palma’s more recent works demonstrate a different direction in her artistic production, one that does not delve further into the historical repertoire of references used in her previous works — Baroque and Roccoco, painting and drawing by the naturalist artists, stained glass and decorative works, fashion, architecture, and design — but rather into the fine craft that is painting itself, the refinement of the process that generates images, that shifts between the high tech and more refined craftsmanship, using paint and paintbrushes. The artist has maintained her figurative and representational practice, but employs a more poetic, abstract way of thinking, prioritizing pictorial language over narrative. This shift is evident in the installation at the entrance of the exhibition, a still life where the artist presents an immersion into painting, the experience of a labyrinth of diaphanous images, juxtaposed and floating, that envelop the viewer in lights, colors, images, and layers of transparencies as they pass through, as though penetrating a picture.

Palma’s focus is now on the essence of painting, the doing, the doing, and on building a personal and original world of imagery, characterized by voluptuous forms, pulsing colors, and the sensuality of the experience of the gaze. The production of the work is laborious and extensive. It starts with arbitrarily collecting printed images or images from social networks. All are transferred to the computer where the artist works like artificial intelligence, manipulating thousands of visual fragments: the corner of a landscape, a puffed sleeve, ribbon bows, parts of architecture, fragments of bodies, palm trees, textures, transparencies, flowers, trees, stones, fruit, satellites and celestial objects, brides, dancers…From this combination of Photoshop + the artist’s poetic algorithm + a wide range of references, she chooses, after countless fusions, one digital composition, an image-model, to be painted onto canvas.

The canvases, in turn, are prepared with a complex and laborious marbled background, considered the most extravagant technique in book decoration since the 16th century. On this base, imprinted as a huge monotype according to the artist’s design of the distribution of pigments onto the model, lines and marks appear that define the composition: the color pallet, the structure of the draft, the distribution of volumes.

Onto the canvases, skillful work with paint and paintbrushes constructs forms and figures in woven compositions, almost always in large formats, with a particular interest in curvilinear shapes and lines, structured around an axis or central point. Thus, these great staged paintings emerge, formal and colorful events in a decidedly illusory space, a theatrical fantasy, excavating the basic meaning of light and space.

Born from an image that exists only virtually, it is notable that the plane of the painting that gives it place and materiality, a presence in the world, is a diaphanous surface without any thickness, without brushstrokes or the hand of the artist, similar to the great classics, but also to the electronic images of its origin, that it seems to treat ironically. It is as if there was no labor involved. The magical illusion of great beauty. Yet, silent, like an instant event that interrupts an action, establishing itself as a metaphysical interval, without before or after, causing, faced with the logic and regimes of expectations they elicit, a deviation from the culture and tradition they are automatically subscribed to. These are works that fill the gaze, enchant the viewer. They seem to seek an extreme beauty in painting and to celebrate the pleasure of the process, that is intimate and rigorous. A virtuous representation to allow a calculated and precise deformation of reality, and a strangeness, placing them in the particularly narrow strip of intelligibility that survives between the beautiful and the absurd.

The embroidered works are another result of experimentation in the studio, an environment that, in this case, deserves a description. Surrounding a small, verdant internal garden, besides the traditional painter’s instruments and materials — easels, canvases, paintbrushes, spatulas, paints, and solvents — there is an enormous variety of scraps of fabric, lace, thread, ribbon, boxes of glass beads, bugle beads, crystals, sequins; pieces of wood and trunks, leaves and dried flowers, plastic and paper flowers; piles of books and magazines, mechanical reproductions of photos on the walls, handmade objects; straw baskets, gourds, tree bark; snails, shells, bits of animal skin, feathers, plumes, plants, natural flowers, and much more. These elements are also references and objects in all the artist’s production. If the surfaces of the paintings are flat, without visible thickness, in the latter, the surface might be, smooth and rough at the same time, voluminous, with cutouts, protrusions, textures, always warm and sensual, like a surface longing to be touched by giving materiality to the painting and opening the work to the noise of the world. 

They are certainly part of the artist’s pictorial production but as a calculated counterpoint to the silent sobriety of the representations in the paintings. Between tapestries and banners, these are vibrant compositions, rich in materials and detail, not at all like quilts or patchwork. Starting with an image printed onto a white satin canvas, the embroideries are accumulative surfaces, magma-like, meandering and modeled like a relief. A handcrafted work with fabrics, thread, and other materials, made with the help of an embroiderer — the hand that carries out the work is not Palma’s — according to an agreement between the artists. They are collages that mimic a dynamic painting, with transparent layers, heaps of material, light, and shadow, in an ambiguous commentary, somewhat extravagant, maybe, but never a parody; they are strident, eye-catching, without being frivolous or carnivalesque. They hark back to the still-life tradition, of tapestries, jacquard, brocade, with flowers, fruits, game, and fish used as decoration, of theatre panneaux, of the banners of fêtes galantes, and of popular festivals. They add to this set of works as another strategy to think about painting, to keep it in motion, to maintain its seductive, involving character, its capacity to still produce beauty and strangeness.

A set of photographs closes the exhibition. Like the watercolors where hybrid, delicate, and solitary organic forms rest on paper, like in a botanical or zoological image, the photographs evoke more somber and unsettling still lifes from the painting tradition, especially from the Netherlands. They are part of a process of reflection, like drafts, small practice works of form, drawing, color, texture. Something precious, intimate, as familiar to painters as notes made in a notebook. Yet, unlike the combination of virtual elements that generates an original image of a painting on a computer, Palma uses material elements, natural models — the artist’s hand collecting debris from the world — with a more speculative and casual process in the compositions.

Onto a mass of debris from a vacuum cleaner — a dense, monochrome, uneven material — the artist arranges flowers, fruit, shells, snails, dried leaves, twigs, and bone fragments in compositions that are very simple but which have great visual and, occasionally, metaphoric effect. The strange objectivity of these images, with such explicit references, is permeated with suggestions of the passage of time, material degradation, the transcience of beauty, eroticism, death.

Mariana Palma’s painting is born from the spirit of a collector and accumulator, from an eye attentive to all and every detail of the world that surrounds it. She produces luxurious images, opulent forms, a voluptuous and insinuating beauty, decidedly feminine. On the one hand, her work represents, at this time when painting is perceived more as a cultural than artistic manifestation, an engagement in the pleasure of the process, a commitment to painting as experience, language, knowledge, memory; painting as a verb that expresses action, process, desire, occurrence. On the other hand, the artist seeks to install painting as a tool of resistance, marking out a space for it in contemporary visuality, in the sense of interrupting, suspending the normality of the banal and endless narrative of the social media scroll. She seeks to recover the experience of contemplation, of silence. She proposes looking at the works, closing your eyes, imagining. And for exactly that reason, they do not have titles.