The Painting of Mari Gamarra
The world of the artist-painter Mari Gamarra is pure “magical realism”.
Her creative process overlaps reality and dreams. It is a powerful reflection of expressions of emotion, events, life, and hope which combine into unique poetic compositions, which overflow onto her canvasses.
She is a storyteller who uses observations to enhance the surreal experience of time. Her paintings are intense “life experiences” imbued with a rich, vivid, and unbroken palette of colors and patterns which enchant and capture the observer through every brushstroke. Gamarra’s ritual use of colors liberates her intrinsic passion which is deeply rooted within her Latin American identity. The stories that occupy her canvases are created through those colors and form visual poetry that continues to espouse an everlasting message of magical realism which visually captures the observer and touches upon those loose threads of emotion buried deep inside each of us.
The world of Gamarra is a great eye of the artist who wants to capture everything and place it on her canvases. The technique she uses in her work resides first and foremost in the search for poetic composition. In the process, she overlaps reality and dreams.
To achieve this says Carlos Ocampo, art critic of The Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City: “…The artist creates with the conviction of a person who knows exactly what she is in search of. She is a non-believer in the sudden unveiling, she evades with the skill of a tight-rope walker, the temptations of easy and immediate anecdotes. She keeps herself at a safe distance from flamboyant distinctions that attract the inattentive observer who persists in reducing paintings to an illustration of their most fascinating aspects. Only through the deliberate search for an ascetic expression does she make bloom the links that represent the focus of her true interest: among them the conception of liberty.”
Mari Gamarra has developed long series which have served as coordinates in her pictorial work. When she was still an art student, she started timidly a series called: “Attendants” and with it, she opened herself to the public. That series started becoming more robust with the pictorial and poetic work that was generated within her. This gave birth to her longest and more controversial series: “Transhumants” which speaks to us of the mass of people in movement, of exodus and tests of humanity, and of hope and happiness through time.
Mario Arbeláez, a Colombian Art critic, says of this series of Gamarra: “…If she were not a poet she would be moving blindly, lonely and anxiously on the road of her search. But she is a poet, and she has sent a message from a bend in this road, with her eyes open and her soul full of conviction: “…I am attentive of the man who trespasses the mists of time…”.
Her loneliness declares itself like a mirror; it is an echo of tumultuous solitude that participates with pain and perplexment in the human drama that appears silently in her painting, where happiness, like a rattle still hidden in some indistinguishable point, is produced by the force of the strokes of her brushes and her magic load of colors.
Other series of hers are:
“The Charm of Love” captures the joys around sensuality, the emotion of love, and the glorious moments when through love the soul is filled with bliss.
Her series, titled: “The Eye of the Artist in the Emirates” is based on her own experience of having been touched by the charms of the UAE.
When the artist lived in New York, she worked on her series: “The Days of War”, this is a series that scrutinized the devastating Gulf War of 1991: “Desert Storm”.
“The Eye of the Artist in Asia” where Gamarra lived for three years, this series captures a fragile spatial and temporal serenity in a world that needs no recognition.
“Violence” the work is about the situation of war and grief around the planet and particularly about her country, Colombia.
The series: “Tauromaquia” on the art of bullfighting, captures the surrealism and poetry intrinsic to Hispanic myths.
Currently, she is working on two series. The one series is titled "The Synchronicity of Time". In this series, Gamarra captures the spiritual process that she has long been pursuing inside herself and which guides her towards a place full of colors, poetry, and silence. It is a place where art is the compass that guides her continuous path towards the infinite and which reveals itself in the magical realism of her artworks.
The other series in which the artist continues to work is in her series: “Transhumants”. A pictorial narrative that has been maturing through the years in her painting, due to the recording of the facts in the different situations of the mass exodus of people displaced from their countries and their comfort zone; events that we all witness daily. The Artist collects these facts and registers them pictorially from her artistic position, without any political connotation, but as a record that will remain to visually support the history of humanity during the 20th and 21st centuries.
These last two series in which Gamarra is currently working mix and feed each other. Her language of time combines together with her incisive eye of the artist and in turn, both are juxtaposed with sensitive geometries. Her artworks delight the observer and depict dreamy life fictions which feel as if they were to jump off the canvass and embrace you in the magical world of Gamarra.
Gamarra's paintings are in private collections in Canada, USA, France, England, Italy, Dominican Republic, Spain, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Cuba, Peru, Germany, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Greece, Hong Kong, and the UAE.
She had previous art studios in Bogota, Colombia; Santo Domingo, D.R.; Florence, Italy; Montreal, Canada; New York City, USA; Mexico City, Mexico; Bangkok, Thailand; Singapore, Singapore; Milan, Italy; Athens -Nea Makris, Greece; Seattle, WA; Port Washington, NY, USA; Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and currently in New York.