"Just as the whole is nothing, noise transforms into silence by opposition"
Daily Note El Independiente, Family and Culture section - June 1, 2014
An artist with roots in Chilecito who left the place where she grew up to live in Buenos Aires. The young artist is internationally recognized and is currently studying the postgraduate course in Cultural Management at the IUNA and works as an assistant to the renowned artist Eugenio Cuttica.
FyC: How were your beginnings with art?
PM: I grew up with art, in my house, thanks to my mother (Alicia Alba), everything, even the most everyday, is seen and done with the freedom and vitality with which one paints a picture. The house is like a workshop, a shoe is no longer a shoe to be part of an installation that marks a path of steps. One of the phrases that I always remember is that while we were drawing and staining or leaving "badly", my mother said "do not worry about art, everything is fixed", and in that it became, every action in art, in that space where everything is possible and malleable.
FyC: Who caused you to develop artistically?
PM: I was motivated by conflicts, injustices, times and distances, the unfortunate school psychologists ... which I now thank. When I was 16 years old, my mom (Alicia Alba) was the one who saw all these disorganized ideas and energies, helped me see them, and redirected them.
FyC: Do you remember your first drawing?
PM: The first drawing was wanting to convey a message, I did it in high school (Escuela Normal "Joaquín V. González"). I liked inventing different typefaces with songs and interminable plots with a pen, I even gave some works or exams, "illustrated" with these images. That first drawing ... it was a big denture facing to one of the characters that I'm still drawing today. Then I continued making several more in the margins of the Rivadavia school papers ... I still keep them. I remember one of those days being in French class with a very dear teacher that many of us called "Bonjour" (Prof. Soteras), I was in the front row while she taught and looked at me ... I continued very concentrated on the lines I was drawing. Until she told me "to try to pay attention to my French class if what you are going to do is draw."
FyC: If you would have to define what you do artistically, what would you call it?
PM: Every time I am more aware that no matter the medium in which the work was made, if it is made with inks, acrylics, objects or video, it is not relevant to me the genre or style, because it would only be a way to pigeonhole it, I prefer to define them by the content that is what that person felt or interpreted that stopped a few moments in front of the work.
FyC: What motivates the work you do? Where do the muses come from?
PM: This year I am celebrating my first decade of being actively involved with artistic work, if you could call it that, and I can affirm that the only place where the muses appear is in a mind that is working, thinking about the work or taking it out. It is like a wheel that is hard to turn, but once it has found its movement, it flows easily and if one is in tune with that movement, ideas arise and pile up in the scorers. This cycle is not exclusive of "artistic work", it extends to everything ... you just have to be attentive and let it happen. The problem is when the wheel is ignored and stopped: "when the art is left aside, the wet trunks are moved, the wound is opened and the bugs do not stop coming out (...)" (Paloma Marquez April 2007)
FyC: What are you trying to transmit through your work?
PM: My works speak of man, of his simplest aspect, his cycles and processes, his thoughts, and above all of the situations that stand in his way and that he must resolve, analyzing the obstacles, but always "calmly active and actively calm "(P. Yogananda). The whole society is a reflection of each individual, I like to observe (from inside and outside) how the crowds, move like a choreography, divide, compress and disperse. These piles of people, objects, thoughts, generate noise, eternal murmurs. Just as the whole is nothing ... the noise is transformed into silences by opposition. I am working on a new series of works in which I also highlight the objects that surround us and accompany us, objects as evidences of what we are.
FyC: What is Chilecito for you?
PM: I think of Chilecito and the first thing that comes to my mind is that immense violet and blue irregular line of imposing hills, which contain and guard those who live there. Chilecito is the place that I take with me and where I always return to carry me once more with the energy of its streets, the wisdom of the walnuts, to learn from the strength of its people, from the silences of the stones, from the dilated times and of the possible immensities.
FyC: What was it like to settle in Buenos Aires? How did you live with uprooting?
PM: I came to Buenos Aires in 2007 to study Sound at the National University of Lanús and Visual Arts at the ProyectArte School. I went from silence to noise and I had to learn to see the silence in that noise. The change was reflected in my work, the works I did while in Buenos Aires showed my amazement for the crowds and the crowding, the need for space, the hostility of so much cement. The departure, to emigrate was always present in my life, to the point that returning is also leaving and that implies everything that one brings with him and what he leaves behind. I prefer to see the game and also the return as a new trip since the place may be the same but one is no longer the same. I'm just working on a series of paintings that speak of that ... of these immense containers of immobile objects and ideas, petrified, that we carry every time we move.
FyC: You were in international exhibitions as representative of Argentina In what places? What were the returns you received? How was the experience of traveling abroad?
PM: I had the opportunity to exhibit my works several times abroad, at the Argentine Consulate in New York (USA), at the Starchariot Studio Gallery, Los Angeles (California, USA) and David Rockefeller Center of Latinamerican Studios belonging to the Harvard University (Boston, USA) where I participated in a debate representing emerging artists who obtain scholarships for their artistic development, since I had received the ProyectArte scholarship. Each of the trips that I made, were very enriching from every point of view, the experience to travel and to survive the loneliness of oneself, to know another culture. But above all the unforgettable hours in museums and art fairs, the amazement of seeing the works that one always sees in books, and also discovering artists who are on the international scene working on works of another magnitude to those we see here.
FyC: How do you see the movement of plastic arts in La Rioja?
PM: I'm happy to see works by two artists from La Rioja this year at ArteBA (Geri and Noel de la Cara), I think it's an encouragement for all those who are developing their works.
FyC: Do you have any sample or exhibition already scheduled for 2014?
PM: I'm working on a new series of works (paintings and installations), and completing the details for the exhibition, which will be during 2014. Of these works, one was already selected for the Vittal Foundation's Painting Prize (which it is currently being exhibited at Espacio MODOS in Buenos Aires).
FyC: Are you going to exhibit in La Rioja soon?
PM: I would love to make another exhibition in La Rioja and in Chilecito, like the one we did with Alicia Alba, "From such Alicia such Paloma" but I have nothing scheduled.