Criticism

The desiring natures of Eugenia Marcos

Alberto Ruy Sánchez

When this woman paints a vegetable, it is as if she were caressing it, smelling it, tasting it with all of her senses before taking it to her mouth. When observing her paintings one has the impression that she outlines them by increasing her own connection to them, before leaving them ready to be devoured by the eyes. When we look at her oranges, we witness that instant in which she slowly creates their round forms. But by the time we look at them we are also caressing them. There is no witness of this work who will not suddenly become her accomplice. She makes us touch, with the eyes, this highly lingering life which in English is called “still life” and in Spanish, for one of those perversions of the language we call “dead nature”, naturaleza muerta. But Eugenia Marcos creates another perspective about the genre. She reinvents it as an intense approach of a glance in which every pore becomes greedy of touch and sight. She lets us caress with our eyes these vegetable entities, foreign but desirable, more desirable at every moment, which might become, which might wishfully become part of our own body.

So foreign they are that they belong to another species, and as desirable as it is the splendor with which they are offered in the paintings. Art as the antechamber of cuisine or cuisine as the antechamber of art. The old dilemma of egg and chicken. In this art, it does not matter what it was, but what it is, what it is happening. This vegetables display their existence before our eyes. We do not eat them when we see them, our mouth is not watering yet, but we do let ourselves to be completely seduced by its forms, enhanced by the composition of the painting, so known and so unfamiliar. We start moulding them, starting from sight, but making them ours through the other senses.

Neither Still Life, nor Naturaleza Muerta, what Eugenia Marcos paints and systematically reinvents deserves to be called “Desiring Natures” of unrestrained sensuality.

She grabs the instruments offered by the scientific illustration of nature as it was done during the 19th century. She knows how to distinguish its aesthetical advantages as well as the ingredients of charm that time has transformed into the testimony of an artist with passion for the surprising forms of the world. In the illustration she emphasizes whatever there is of a fascinated gesture, of a portrait that wants to be cold but fails, of a combination between visual and written. She also takes from illustration its nature of exploration and knowledge, but she does it as lovers recognize each other with kisses and caresses. They explore inside and outside, they examine each other in detail from different angles and they call each other.

She takes us inside an illusion of reality which is implicit to the scientific illustration, and out of a sudden she takes her distance so to introduce elements that compel to stop, to look again and to listen as they say: “this is representation, image, painting”. Such as lovers interrupt a kiss and breathe looking into their eyes.

Eugenia Marcos also explores the possibilities of internal composition of the painting in relation to a window, a niche or even to canvases, floating or tied. She transforms them into paintings within paintings within paintings. But she does it both frankly and subtly. It is like an unexpected caress inside other caresses that were intended somewhere else.

And when things float in the air of her paintings, the seeds fall into different realities within the successive compositions, where fruits or vegetables seem to levitate in an uncertain reality; it is like a set of sudden and perfect love sensations that provoke other similar or different sensations.

When Eugenia Marcos makes extreme close-ups to a vegetable, she manages, for example, to transform the whimsical interior of a pepper into something even more definite and unique than a face. But she does not withdraw from the ever-surprising portrait of the intimacy of the beloved, which is revealed as an exceptional apparition whose beauty is as definite as it is strange. She does not equal them; she simply exposes the desiring link which opens a radical aesthetic revelation.

Eugenia Marcos is an artist full of an exploring sensuality which once and again discovers absolute revelations. Unlike many other painters, she makes this vegetal eroticism with a subtle aesthetic where fruits and vegetables are nor mere metaphors of other human bodies. She goes deeper and shows the fundamental erotic link that join us to the world; the natural thread of desire.