Marina De Caro

Mar del Plata, Argentina, 1961

            Marina de Caro's work bets on subjective withdrawal, on the first-hand material provided by the world of intimacy. The inward movement of her work does not imply a return to the world of the private or the everyday but to that which is specific to the intimate: the body. All of the media she implements, such as drawing, ceramics, and, most emblematically, weaving, point to a sensitive and bodily involvement, in which the viewer is also invited to immerse themselves. Her soft environments and enveloping installations coexist with the stubborn presence of craftsmanship and handicraft. In this way, her work moves away from the contemplative and narrative, to lean towards the experience and its enactment.

            Her participation in the world of theater, as well as her interest in the world of clothing, are evidence that she was dedicated to thinking about ways to inhabit space and modulate the body. Architecture and fashion are two areas of influence used to provide a habitat for a set of questions that persist in her work, questions about the childlike, the feminine, the sinister. All of them revolve around the way in which these minor experiences can be produced from an embodied thought and a silent practice. Concentrating on this task, she unfolds matter in all its forms: expanded, elevated, fallen, contracted, disproportionate, light, full, rigid, malleable. 

            Her work, formally tempting, warm, and welcoming, seems to invite sensorial engagement, tactile and visual rapture; but, at the same time, in that experience of closeness, the pieces open their conceptual density. Her work seems to preach against the given, against inherited categories and the rigidity of assigned roles. This preaching has its resonance in an extensive pedagogical trajectory that De Caro has developed, in communion with her artistic work. In addition to her workshop for artists, she coordinated the Trama Project, the Video Bastardo meetings, and the Club de Herramientas Disponibles, among many others. The prowess of her work, its fundamental victory, and its capital lie in the swaying that it suggests: the unfolding of body and intelligence, as two simultaneously heterogeneous and inseparable forces, that power of gentle approach and distancing, which invites one to explore and to experiment.