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, 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, prioritizing pictorial language over narrative 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. 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.

Both paintings and embroideries are the result of a laborious, experimental, and lengthy process of work. Starting with arbitrary collection from a wide range of visual references stored on the computer, Palma works like an artificial intelligence, manipulating thousands of fragments. From this combination of photoshop + the artist’s poetic algorithm, she chooses, after countless fusions, one digital composition, an image-model, to be painted onto canvas.

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.

The embroideries, on the other hand, are accumulative surfaces, magma-like, meandering and modeled like a relief. If the surfaces of the paintings are flat, without visible thickness or brush marks from the artist’s hand, 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. 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.    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.

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.