The National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) hosted the personal exhibition of Carmen Marin, “Absences: The Being in the Empty Space” exhibition, curated by Marilena Preda Sânc, until November 24.
“Carmen Marin is a painter existentially dedicated to the art of creating images in which man as presence and absence represents the being in the real and imagined world. In front of her paintings we feel the tension of self-referentiality due to an introspective immersion that the author naturally practices by exploring the personal self and the self of others.
We recognize, in the process of image contemplation, a mnemonic of the inhabitation of the thought-gesture embedded in multiple layers of a reflected reality, where the absence of something or someone becomes an echo of a melancholy that overwhelms us.
In absence we find silence, and in silence we find depth – a fountain of unexplored meanings, an invitation to contemplation and to understanding the true nature of our being.(Carmen Marin)
From the interaction between probable/possible dream-reality, through the superimposition of veils of colour incised with calligraphy, strongly chromatised gestural accents, life stories and their traces are outlined. The figurative element and the presence of the human being are essentialised from a psychological, spiritual perspective and become the bearers of hidden traumas, of an existential longing.
The images created by Carmen Marin are sensory screens through which we step from our own experiences into an abstract, timeless space. Her painting becomes a capture, a stop-frame in a movie directed by the heart and mind of the creator, who is thus able to communicate from the intimacy of the act of creation a moment of profound experience and revelation of a state, an existential truth.
The painter Carmen Marin’s universe of images is fed from the worlds of knowledge – literature, music, philosophy, anthropology, religion, anthroposophy. In a lively, ramified dialogue with Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, Francis Bacon, Kazimir Malevich, Mark Rothko, as the painter reveals, the image is shaped.
My painting is “made” in the process of nocturnal-dreamlike sedimentation of the problematic of painting, from the handcrafted gesture the thought is assisted in its birth, to crystallize, to become palpable, retinal. Not every idea can become manifest, not every eye can perceive the palimpsest. The visible does not imply presence. (Carmen Marin)
Her inner state is connected to the specific problems of contemporary society. As a painter with genuine empathy for the world in which she lives, she captures in her works the fragile existential balance of man/humanity, considering as an act of normality the re-evaluation of identity, the meaning of our being in the world. Her works confirm the continuing presence of syncretic expressionism, researched and presented by Carmen Marin in her doctoral thesis.”
Carmen Marin reflects in her paintings the human condition as art and life.”
Carmen Marin graduated from the National University of Arts in Bucharest (class prof. Ștefan Câlția) 2000. PhD in Visual Arts, 2024. Exhibitions in museums and art galleries in the country and abroad. Solo exhibitions (selective): National Museum of Moldavia, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova; Crișurilor Country Museum, Oradea, Romania; Dix Gallery, Helsinki, Finland; Storck Gallery, Oslo, Norway. Group exhibitions (selective): XL Space Gallery, New York, USA; Art Museum Athena, Greece; Mana Contemporary Open House, Jersey City, USA; Open House, Kiev, Ukraine.
Source: mnac.ro
