Garcia de Marina. Nuances Automatic translate

Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art presents an exhibition by Spanish photographer Garcia de Marina, inviting you to take a fresh look at familiar things

• Visual poetry that can awaken the viewer from the sleep of everyday life
• Witty interpretation and combination of familiar everyday objects into irrational images that reveal new nuances of meaning
• Pure art of photography without additional image manipulation

This is the second exhibition of works by Spanish photographer Garcia de Marina at the Erarta Museum. The author’s works were presented at the museum for the first time in 2021: then, at the “Achronia” exhibition, viewers noted that the photographer’s works were very interesting to look at, solving them like charades. Indeed, one cannot help but admire how easily and wittily de Marina’s simple things are combined into plots, giving rise to new nuances of meaning.

The photographer says he sees the everyday as art and challenges the obvious. He characterizes his work as visual poetry. De Marina’s works are indeed characterized by the metaphorical nature characteristic of poetic language: the author describes human existence through the life of objects, animating them, transferring human emotions to them and awakening empathy in the audience.

As children, we all fantasize and think that the objects around us come to life when we don’t see it. Bored with homework, everyone probably played with a ruler, drew eyes on an eraser and imagined the compass as a ballerina spinning on one leg, just like in Garcia de Marina’s photograph. But with age, this passes, and an ordinary adult increasingly looks, but does not see.

De Marina captures what eludes our superficial gaze: by folding familiar everyday objects into irrational images, he gives them new meaning. Garcia de Marina admits that he is interested in symbols and the random combination of elements that previously had no relation to each other. The author also wittily visualizes speech patterns that are also used in Russian: “noose tie,” “a matter of time,” “the money burned.” By focusing on the unusualness of ordinary life, the artist awakens the viewer from the sleep of everyday life.

A similar approach was used by the surrealists: both painters and photographers. Probably, many in this regard will remember the creations of Rene Magritte or Man Ray with his famous “Ingres Violin”, where the naked female back becomes a musical instrument. De Marina consciously continues and develops the traditions of surreal photography, calling his genre “conceptual photography,” thereby emphasizing that each of his works visualizes a specific idea.

Garcia de Marina’s work is photography in its purest form. The author does not perform any manipulations with the image. He translates ideas directly into objects and uses a camera that provides great detail and allows him to work with large-format prints. The artist even prefers natural lighting to avoid harsh shadows: he shoots in the morning or in cloudy weather, and during the day he prepares new objects for filming. Some of them remain to live in Garcia’s workshop, pushing him to new ideas.

Now Garcia de Marina is a renowned photographer and exhibits a lot. Spain’s state postal service issued stamps based on his photograph, which depicts a globe with a gas mask on it - a reminder of the environmental crisis. By the way, this work was presented at the first exhibition in Erarta and remained in the museum as part of the permanent exhibition.

And back in 2010, de Marina accidentally bought a camera and realized - this is it! He completed online courses and began wandering around the back streets of the Workers’ University in his hometown of Gijon in search of a good shot. This is a place of amazing beauty - a whole complex of buildings, an architectural utopia with a bell tower, a theater, colonnades and arcades. Having honed his attention to architectural details, the author began to come up with his own images for shooting. Then he was a civil servant, and was engaged in photography at the same time. The struggle between work and hobby continued for some time, but in the end creativity won and even provided the author with the means to live. Agree, an inspiring story for anyone taking their first steps in art, and a convincing confirmation of Joseph Beuys’s oft-quoted thesis that “every person is an artist.”

about the author

Garcia de Marina was born in 1975 in Gijon (Spain). He began taking photographs in 2010, and in 2015, the Spanish Embassy invited de Marina to represent the country at the FotoWeek DC competition. Two years later, Spain’s Museum of Contemporary Art of Castile and León selected three of his works for the exhibition Constellations: Experimental Poetry in Spain (1963–2016), which featured for the first time examples of visual and experimental poetry from the 1960s to the present.

In 2018, García de Marina’s works were presented at the Diálo2 exhibition at the Juan Barjola Painting Museum in Gijón, along with works by Joan Brossa, one of the most famous masters of visual poetry. In 2019–2020, the author’s projects were demonstrated at the Cervantes Institute in Belgrade (Serbia), at the cultural center Laboral Ciudad de la Cultura (Gijon, Spain), and at the Cervantes Institute in Budapest (Hungary). In 2021, the Spanish state postal service Sociedad Estatal Correos y Telégrafos, SA put into circulation 162,000 stamps based on Garcia de Marina’s photograph. In the same year, his first personal exhibition in Russia was held at the Erarta Museum with great success.

In recent years, the author has taken part in dozens of photo festivals both at home and abroad: among them the Xposure International Photography Festival (UAE), Addis Foto Fest (Ethiopia), Photo Romania Festival (Romania), Budapest Photo Festival (Hungary), Uppsala Fotofestival (Sweden) and others.