The light hits the edge of the river, illuminates the waterfall, makes the water glow, and ignites the rock, pronouncing the rococo of its stones and plants. It makes all creatures shine: fish, birds, dogs, horses, gargoyles, dragons, and other nameless beasts. The incidence of this brightness confuses background and surface, mixes colors, disrupts textures, and dissolves bodies into one another. In this watery chiaroscuro—half solid, half liquid—we witness the mystery of creation and transformation of things in the world... Just as we feel something stirs within us when the watercourses of our intestines revolt.

It is under this aura that Marina Woisky's creations are born. Ambiguous apparitions emerge from her work, object-images that seduce with enigmatic magnetism, offering unusual visualities and performing deceptions that do not allow us to discern what is flat from what is relief, what is hard from what is soft, what is dry from what is wet. In her radical handling of certain images, the artist conducts an intense mixing process that involves editing and photographic printing, sewing techniques, the creation of volumetrics by filling fabrics with plaster and cement, and finally, resin baths and other finishes. By tensioning the boundaries between photography, painting, and sculpture, her works inhabit the liminal space between bi and tridimensionality. In this limbo between amorphous masses and discernible figures, they incite shifts in perspective and synesthetic sensations, leading to a dynamic game that articulates familiarity and strangeness, stimulating our sensory system and imagination.

The starting point and destination of Woisky’s work are the ornament as a historical figure, its relationship with organic nature, its semantic dimension, and emotional implication, which amount to the energetic charge of elements whose usual role is to exist on the margins of narratives. Adornments, embellishments, decorations—everything that beautifies the planet, the details that bind unraveling events without imposing itself as a nuclear component in the flow of stories. Attracted to the qualities of these visual codes, the artist finds aesthetic embryos to reprogram, gestating them in her unique way. The images collected from the internet, books, and photograph collections, as well as those taken from packaging and patterned fabrics, are transported into an ideal space-time. Stripped of their original meaning, they are unfolded into other contexts and given new existential possibilities. The symbolism of their genesis is further densified by the material complexity of their new embodiment. Thus, metamorphic creatures and landscapes emerge without a defined nature or location, composing their own repertoire, as mythological and symbolic as they are ornamental and decorative.

In her first solo exhibition, Pedras e bichos d'água [Water Stones and Creatures], the artist’s primary source of images are the reformulation of the Baroque and certain Asian schools in contemporary culture, with special attention to certain liminal illustrations of animals and the verticality in representations of waterfalls. Interested in the transmutation of the magic that surrounds these beings and places when they inspire everyday objects, Marina discusses the intricacies of contemporary image production, dissecting the aesthetic status of decoration, from more classical notions, through pastiche and kitsch, to mass culture and the digital advent.

The volume, the brightness, and the greenish tonality she creates give the creatures a certain enchantment, reminiscent of the symbolic representations engraved in stones such as jade and amazonite. In this way, they resemble the ecology of cascading landscapes—drawn from Oriental imaginaries—and their ethereal atmosphere, filled with carps and swans in immaculate movements. These waterfalls appear in the exhibition space as visual information and architectural commentary—sometimes as windows, sometimes as a kind of room divider, lattice, or cobogós—, always bringing the fascinating materiality, the biological vitality, and the sacred premonition, that is, the spiritual potential of these places. The waterfall is thus revealed as a geological formation, as an opportunity for bathing, and as an oratory.

Between the common and the unheard, between the rigid and the flexible, these talismanic works open us up to planetary discovery, to a journey through continents, through centuries, reminding us of what is superfluous, frivolous, extravagant, and bizarre in fields and gardens, in houses and cathedrals, on shelves and in yards, on social media and in commercial streets. They are universal motifs disguised in their regionalism, bathed in the fluids of the unspeakable, of what is yet without a name.

Now, what is on the edges becomes evident. Instead of focusing on the central pieces of a linear mechanism, the eye is free to devour an entire story formed in a circular, spiral manner, composed only of arrangements and combinations made of what is not fundamental to the structure. As a response to the modern axiom "form follows function", these works remind us that, above all, imagination must prevail. These are mundane cutouts: shining creatures, exuberant gateways to cross, fabulous waterfalls to bathe in, sorcery of forms, figures that liquefy into abstraction, open mouths and full-throttle claws, stirring the fantasy, at neck height, hunting the nape, moving the eyes, ready to lunge.