Ni animal ni tampoco ángel. Marina Vargas

Marina Vargas has made use of the vast options offered by contemporary visual language and its disciplines to narrate, in an acute, radical, incisive, and profound way, what words sometimes fail to convey. Trauma resides in the body because it came from the body, and there were silences, but also screams. In her work, one hears a poetic body, but also a political one, in images that are truth, sincerity, in a tempered and paradoxically abysmal manner that I have rarely encountered. She draws on references from the history of art, fundamentally on representations of canonical bodies inherited from Classical Antiquity (seven heads, seven and a half, eight, eight and a half, nine… a great dilemma), but also on analogies and resources that often come from the unconscious and from letting the mind fly without limits, from chance… or from moving through life without restraint, sometimes abruptly, at other times in torrents.

Building on her series begun in 2015, Marina Vargas offers a critical reinterpretation and update of the project Neither Animal Nor Angel.
The artist revisits the idea of the body through intervention, shifting perspectives, and life experience, inviting us to take a fresh look at what we believed to be fixed or canonical.

The exhibition questions inherited models of beauty, perfection, and power, with the human figure ceasing to be a single, dogmatic ideal and becoming a contested territory. Rethinking the body image today involves revisiting these forms, intervening in them, stretching them, and bringing them into the present from other places and other experiences.