“My paintings can be taken in any direction the viewer may desire. While I’m painting, the private and public, personal and political, palpable and philosophical remain entangled in my mind. In my mind, vision, social reality and realpolitik are inseparable from one another.” —Carmen Marin

The National Museum of Fine Arts in Chișinău is pleased to showcase recently executed paintings by Carmen Marin. Titled Toward Primordiality, the exhibition comprises twenty-four paintings through which Marin explores aspects of the human subject, transcending the linguistic boundaries between figuration and abstraction, body and mind, the visible and invisible. These semi-figurative paintings aim to overturn the limitations of languages and comment on the artificialities of cultural constructs. The free will of the human subject and that of the painter define the crux of Marin’s practice.

Marin’s readings of the phenomenological writings of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty have been essential in informing her methodologies of articulating human figures through the medium of acrylic on linen. Within a given painting of Marin, the viewer encounters the inseparability of partly recognizable figures, indexical traces and gestural marks.

As sensation, apprehension and perception of ourselves and the world within and around us unfold in space and time, this exhibition of Marin invites us to explore our corporeality through the thinking of Merleau-Ponty: “What Saint Augustine said of time—that it is perfectly familiar to each, but that none of us can explain it to the others—must be said of the world.”* Within this series of Marin’s paintings, the corporeality of the human subject is investigated at once through individuality, bodily experiences and broader sociocultural contexts. The exhibition takes its title from Merleau-Ponty’s primacy of perception, where primordial openness remains inseparable from imagery, the body, space and language.

Motivated by the powerfully expressive drawings of Alberto Giacometti, the methodical brushstrokes of Paul Cézanne and the provocative embodiment of human figures of Georg Baselitz, Marin attempts to reveal the necessity for humanity to return to its primordial, primal, instinctive and intuitive grasp of both nature and the social world in order to rectify the pitfalls that industrialization and technology have brought about and continue threatening civilization through self-destruction. Mankind’s obligation to aim for unconditional peace lies within the respect one owes to the next-door neighbor, a respect that must remain on par with that of a distant culture. Within such social contexts, this body of work of Carmen Marin demonstrates painting’s extraordinary power to facilitate social cooperation and peace.

This project is sponsored by the Government of Romania, Department for Relations with the Republic of Moldova under the leadership of Adrian Dupu, Secretary of State of the Department for Relations with the Republic of Moldova. Both the Government of Romania and the National Museum of Fine Arts in Chișinău are highly supportive of innovative artists, intellectual freedom and ambitious artistic undertakings.

The exhibition will be on view from Thursday, April 27 to Sunday, April 30, 2023. Museum hours on these days are from 10 am to 6 pm.

For further information please contact: carmen@carmenmarin.ro

*Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible (1964 in French), trans. Alphonso Lingis (1968; Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1995)), p. 3.