Intersticio is very pleased to present Given Time, Marina G. Guerreiro first solo exhibition with the gallery and in the UK. Thanks to the generous support of the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain in London.

My grandfather used to go for walks and sometimes he would come back with a stone, that he would give to one of her daughters.

Keep that stone, look how beautiful it is.

Now that he is gone, I contemplate those stones and think of his walks in the countryside and the gaze that chooses a stone in between a thousand, the criteria or the sensibility that makes him focus his attention on an object and extract it from its habitat. Would he had chosen a river stone on a volcanic land? Would he had focused his attention on a semi-buried malachite in the slope of a mountain? We feel surprised by the presence of an object that seems not to belong to where it is placed, as if a previous implicit beauty already existed in the chain of exceptionalities that have placed it there. And even this seems like a universal criteria, it unveils a mystery when we discover that someone else choses something you will never put your attention on. Is one of the few moments when we can realize, with some astonishment, that a sensibility di erent to yours occupies another body. We can only feel true love if
we are capable of letting ourselves be fascinated by this challenge.

Thinking about this has made me realize that, when my grandad used to gift me a stone, was a nice gesture, but he also gifted with absolute seriousness. A common stone is an object with no apparent value, but within the act of gifting, more than a stone what you gift is the gaze that found the beauty in that stone, as an invitation to join that discovery. The stone is nothing more than the container of two gazes, looking to found each other on its interior.

Marina’s walks around the neighborhood have so many things in common with my grandfather’s walks and his stones. On her way to do some errands, she directs her gaze to those places where people abandon objects. Sometimes, she looks for something specific, others she allows herself be taken by a disperse attention, others she ask for help to her friends and she claims a rescue of very specific characteristics. When she keeps an object, she carefully looks for a specific place in the studio; there it is going to spend some time living together with the rest of the elements, consolidating an identity, growing, transforming, sharing the space.

The emotional cycles coordinate and modulate the creative process to points that sometimes we cannot understand, nevertheless, Marina’s exhibitions have something of a mood catalogue. She likes to leave the body open to the emotional processes, without escaping the appearance of contradictory moments or rhythm ruptures. This way, the contemplator, can recognize his or herself in the same life that resonates in between this ssures. If we go inside them, we can recognize two forces fighting with no pause in their work: an entropic nature that devours with no pity the fragile structures of the human and psychology in crisis trying to keep an order and create sense in the middle of the absurd. Time is such a terri c vortex and before the panic it provokes, we play to administer it as a child plays to represent an adult’s profession. Marina uses agendas and calendars, tools from rationalism but that also function as charms or spells, protecting us from that ancient horror. They are like a small cage, where we keep the days from scattering over life, turning it into chaos – the reason why they have something compulsive and esoteric.

Even sometimes they go unnoticed, presents also have to do with the administration of time. We have dedicated the time normally reserved for something else to choose, construct and acquire the gift. When we fabricate it, like a craft, we are not giving a mere object but the time we dedicated to it. Maybe that is reason why so many kids give this sort of presents, those who have little more than their own time. Time coagulates in a gift, the gift its charged of spirit. This might let us realise all the energies involved in the material manifestation of the object, in any other way we would not be able to make sense of it. The gift nurtures itself from the a ects and the debts, transcribes emotions that go from forgiveness to desire, lightly uctuating through the frontier of the manifested and the unmanifested. It is point of encounter and exchange, a friendly currency. If the exchange is between an object and a ‘thank you’, this should not have less value than the object itself and it is thus how gratitude may shiver, it is conscious of its disequilibrium and desire to inundate it all.

I return home and there are quiet stones placed on the furniture; they don’t stand books or weight papers, they don’t do anything apart reveling a gratitude held in time.

Text by Raúl Lorenzo Pérez

Marina González Guerreiro (A Guarda, Spain, 1992) explores her practice through an installative approximation to different mediums like sculpture, video, photography or painting, the artist revises the iconographic imaginary around the idea of happiness, putting special attention to the phenomenons related with the emotions and the management of stress as well as the construction of an idealized nature. Her creative process starts with the accumulation of materials, becoming the studio a space for trial, where objects and images from the most diverse origins live together staging a ritual of the intimate. In her work we sense a preciosity constructed through precarious and old materials, as well as the search of equilibrium between order and disorder, control and chance, reason and emotion.

Download Marina G. Guerreiro's CV (PDF)