Maribel Portela

Maribel Portela blurs the borders that exist between shape and essence, natural beauty and artistic beauty, realism and utopia. She manipulates those dichotomies freely, inverting them, negating them, or reaffirming them simultaneously.

But if the work of Maribel Portela tends to show us an animated world of plants and Anthozoa, which, of course, she never copies slavishly, but always interprets in accordance with her freedom as an artist, the fact is that she seems to show us only their shape, while depriving them completely of their essence. Thus, although these artificial entities initially cause an empathic reaction that encourages the gazer to relate with them as if they were living beings, that same impulse very soon clashes with the frontier implied by the materials they are made of. The choice of materials such as paper to represent these creatures from the plant and animal world, contrasts with the vitality they should have, even if what were left of them would be their mere organic vestiges, kept behind the display case of a museum of natural history. Thus, by a true coup de maître, Maribel Portela makes us reflect on the cosmetic aspect of nature, by apparently putting aside any metaphysical speculation about being. We are here confronted with a sort of inverted alchemy, of which the more inveterate materialists could become jealous, if it wasn’t because, at the end, she also makes us reflect on the significance of this concept, by placing us so evidently in front of its absence.

Be that as it may, by this sort of alchemical counter-operation that turns the organic into something artificial, the entities which are in front of us, suddenly pass from the status of naturalia to that of artificialia, thus placing the work of the artist over that of nature. A distinctive chain of paradoxes is thus established, caused by a constant sway between those two notions in the mind of the gazer, that implies the ideas of fugacity of organic beings with respect to the relative permanence of the artificial ones. On could think of Wenzel Jamnitzer or Bernard Palissy who both immortalized animal and vegetal forms by integrating them to works of jewelry and ceramics, if it wasn’t because Maribel Portela’s creatures, much lighter and perishable, in particular those which are made of paper, keep some of the flexibility and fragility of plants, thus staying closer to life, even if having been deprived of their organic essence. Either because the pieces that we see evoke skills such as weaving or tailoring, even if they are made of paper, as it happens with Bordando el cosmos (Embroidering the cosmos), or because, at the opposite, they distance themselves simultaneously from any type of craft activity by establishing themselves as works of art in the full sense of the word, it would seem that Maribel Portela aims at reviving the Renaissance debate that opposed the mechanical arts to the liberal arts. Indeed, while she reveals us the beauty of the natural shapes with her craft skills, she does affirm her own “agency” as an artist defending her right to exercise it as a product of nature itself, but different from it, inasmuch as human being is the privileged depositary of the “mind” or “spirit”, according to Hegel definition, although “spirit” and nature are, at the end, but one single thing, as Schelling insisted.

We are here witnessing something as a union of the opposites in which the “feminine” qualities would be reunited with the “masculine” ones as it happens with the androgyne of alchemy. It could perhaps appear excessive to relate the interests of the artist with the postulates of this esoteric discipline, if it wasn’t for the fact that, in 2010, she participated in an exhibition, in collaboration with Ingid Suckaer, which title, Rosarium Philosopohorum is an explicit reference to a famous alchemical treaty of the 16th century which images relate precisely with the problematic of the hermaphrodite through the representation of the hierogamy of the “King” and “Queen”. In fact, the artist made her own version of this hierogamy in stone. We should bear in mind that the 16th century is precisely the moment in which the cabinets of curiosities, as that of Rodolph II, in Prague, began to flourish, while, in the same century the “Great Art”, also began to grow in importance. With the “Great Art” came also the figure of the Artifex, who, while searching for the panacea that could heal any illness, tried to improve nature by accelerating its process to perfection.

It is a prideful and dangerous idea, to which Maribel Portela seems to be close, not only because of the game she plays between the organic and the artificial, but because of her necessity to create a universe of beauty for herself, akin to the garden of Eden or of earthly delight, counting only on her own power, the power of the artist, of course.

This quest of perfection is perhaps here symbolized by the faked gold (by means of bronze) that seems to sprout, taking the shape of metallic cacti, of Jardín mineral (Mineral Garden). However it is perhaps in the set of sculptures called Jardín onírico (Oneiric garden) that the utopic dimension of Maribel Portela’s work is more evident, not only because of its title, which is in itself quite eloquent, but because of the shape of these organic columns, made of clay and slip, that recall both the seabed as well as the strange figures that haunt the surrealist garden that Edward James created in Xilitla, following an imaginative tradition that reminds us, once again, of the 16th century mannerist gardens. Although these columns could belong to the kingdom of the Anthozoa, they also recall oneiric entities, which might well have a soul of their own. It should be said that the work of Maribel Portela has a mythological dimension, although it is not necessarily evident in Orgánico artificial, in spite of some pieces of the current exhibition that show a powerful tendency toward animism, as Preludio en blanco, Protalo, or the inaugural Liquen and Fruto. One might perhaps better understand the mythological references of Maribel Portela’s work by revisiting older series of the artist where we see divinities, sometime reminiscent of the classical gods, although they tend to refer, above all, to the more “primitive” universe of shamanism. These previous references to shamanism might in fact explain the sort of communication that seems to occur between the gazer and at some of the pieces Orgánico Artificial, or at least with the idea to which they refer.