Manuel Marín celebrates half a century of artistic work

Merry MacMasters

La Jornada Newspaper, Thursday, July 10, 2025, p. 4

Sculptor and painter Manuel Marín (Mexico City, 1951) is celebrating half a century of artistic work—which began with his first solo exhibition at the Casa del Lago in 1974/1975—with the exhibition El encomio del silencio y el vacío (The Praise of Silence and Emptiness ), held at the Museo Casa del Risco. It is not an anthological exhibition intended to be a retrospective, but rather focuses on the two main aspects of his work: sculpture and painting, although drawing also plays a decisive role.

Divided into two sections, the first contains 32 small-format sculptures, made of polychrome steel and painted with acrylic, which come from three projects that began in 2019 and concluded this year. "Floreros" ( Flowers) revolves around plant life, while "Serpientes y ranas" (Snakes and Frogs) deals with animal life, and the third, " Cazones" (Big Heads ), deals with human life.

The painting section includes the series The Absent Man , with 29 paintings painted in 2023, which aim to capture the life of a single day: morning, noon, afternoon, evening, and the beginning of the following morning. This is the first time this work has been exhibited.

Better known as a sculptor, Marín, a member of the Academy of Arts, describes his work as neofigurative , an artistic movement of the second half of the 20th century. This means that it handles the concept of figuration after abstraction. It is no longer abstract, although it is not realistic or surrealist, nor naturalistic, but rather a new figuration , advocating a return to the object and everyday reality.

–In this half-century, where have your artistic explorations taken you?

–In sculpture, I've had four stages, and in painting, three. Sculptural solutions are an extension of my drawing, while painting gradually evolved and is now completely independent of my drawing. In sculpture, I seek a schematization of the natural world, while in painting, an idealization of a thought about seeing.

In the first stage of sculpture, I began making flat pieces; that is, the faces have no volume. They are geometric and painted in an abstract manner. In a second phase, I integrated abstract figures; however, this is figuration in spaces that are no longer abstract. Then, in a third phase, I discovered the possibility of working completely independent planes. I could make a figure that was distributed across different planes in space. You could say they are flat spatial figures. In the fourth stage, the figures are very recognizable, although schematized. Many have a humorous quality because the men walk while sitting, while the animals stand on their heads, for example.

Painting, for its part, went in the direction of reflection on the transcendent. By this I mean that these are paintings that generally reflect an introspective mood, and another of absence of presence. There's nothing in the landscapes . Another characteristic would be the objectification of things one sees without being able to describe them. They may look like animals, although they aren't. There are mountains that look like human heads, but they aren't either. It's in that game .

The praise of silence and emptiness is on display at the Casa del Risco Museum (Plaza San Jacinto 5 and 15, San Ángel neighborhood) until September 28.