At once sculptor, draughtsman and painter, Javier Marín (Uruapan, Mexico 1962) has always paid tribute to Italian culture and art history in his work over thirty years, contaminating themes of pre-Hispanic inspiration with forms and styles proper to Tuscan Mannerism and Roman Baroque.

The exhibition illustrates the artist’s career and research, from his earliest experiments with monumental sculpture using such materials as red Oxaca earth or bronze from Mexican foundries, to his new experiments in recycled resin achieved through digital images or using 3D printers.

Marín’s work is the product of a dialogue between his native culture and his Italian artistic experience. In particular, the artist explores the events of the 16th and 17th centuries in Mexican history and culture in a spirit that is at once critical and yet confident.

MATERIAE is a collection of works that, taken as a group, illustrate the various different paths down which Marín has set out in his research. Weightless, flexible bodies, meaty, exuberant and tense forms find unprecedented expression in the use of new materials, supports and formats – not only marble and wood, but also digital drawing, painting, polyster resin and tapestry.

Experimental and reflexive, Javier Marín’s creative research uses matter as a means of questioning the possibilities of today’s art. Is it possible to draw, expanding into physical space, using today’s resources, or to sculpt in the virtual space of a screen? How can we build the random nature of numbers or of artificial intelligence into artistic creation?

The artist responds by eradicating the differences between genres and methods of production, moving with unusual fluidity from one material to another: from drawing to painting and sculpture, from analogue to digital, and from real physical space to the virtual space of the screen. Adopting a resolutely post-modern gaze, he practices transmedial spatial art and explores new dimensions beyond sculpture.

In two venues in Rome, namely Palazzo Esposizioni Roma and the Museo Nazionale Romano, Terme di Diocleziano – with two simultaneous exhibitions – visitors will be able to experience Javier Marín’s working method stretching from preparation, through design, right up to the process of transformation into monumental tapestries and sculptures.

Palazzo Esposizioni Roma hosts the artist’s more recent output, focusing on the use of new technologies and on the theme of environmental sustainability thanks to the reuse of waste resin from industry. The 35 works on display are made of resin, polyester, amaranth, wood, tapestry, fabric, digital prints and video.

The halls of the Baths of Diocletian will be hosting a monumental work over 8 mt. tall. Entitled Columna, it was made in 2004 entirely from sculptural fragments of bodies in resin and is raised on a wooden base designed to resemble the base of an ancient Roman column. Alongside it, visitors will be able to admire 6 bronze sculptures and tapestries made using designs by the artists with traditional weaving methods from the Yucatan peninsula.

This is not the first time that Javier Marín has shown his work in the city of Rome. The exhibition De 3 en 3 at the Museo MACRO Testaccio (now the Mattatoio di Roma) was held in 2012, while in the same year nine monumental horses and riders and three giant heads in resin, symbolising battlefields and destruction that demand reflection even on the part of combatants, were displayed in Piazza del Pincio.

 
Javier Marín 

A Mexican artist born in Uruapan (Michoacán) in 1962, in the course of his 40-year career Javier Marín has shown his work in over 300 one-man and collective shows in Mexico, the United States and Canada, as well as in several Central American, South American, Asian and European countries. Although many of his works are abstract in nature, ironically he is better known for his figurative sculpture. In his permanent research he makes use of traditional materials and techniques while also developing new techniques, for example the mixed polymers that envelop seeds, sugar, meat, tobacco and other materials. Recently Marín has begun to include 3D printing and scanning in his research, with techniques of integration and subtraction, or hybrid techniques including digital photographic printing, in a constant search for new tools. His work is an invitation to the observer to focus on the visible evidence of procedure, on the central elements in the transformation of materials and on the intervention of third parties, be they people or machines. His work is found in leading public and private collections, including the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Museo de la Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público in Mexico City; the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Monterrey; the Museo del Barro in Caracas; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the Boca Raton Museum of Art and the Latin American Museum in Florida; as well as the Blake – Purnell Collection in New York; the Costantini Collection in the Museo de Arte Latino-americano in Buenos Aires; the Ersel Collection in Turin; and the Art Collection in the Principality of Monaco. Of particular importance among his more recent activities was the establishment of the Javier Marín Foundation, a non-profit organisation set up in 2013 as part of the cultural and artistic environment for pursuing research, forging bonds and professionalising the plastic and visual arts. To achieve this, the Foundation seeks to promote encounters and collaboration in vulnerable communities.