María Emilia Marroquín’s work flows through various times in which it gets in touch with the History of Art, and although its influences are made evident and a rare versatility at the moment of creation is incorporated, very dissimilar pieces are generated in parallel. “Gathering of the retrieved” is the reunion of her latest sculptures and objects, in which she has explored the possibilities of matter from opposite poles for several years.

Not unlike the great sculptor form Rosario Enio Iommi, who had a notable period of Concrete sculpture but later moved on to installations with the most diverse materials, Marroquín generates a corpus of pieces that can be separated and sorted out in very much the same way.

On the one hand, she produces sculptures in which metals fuse with carved wood. Probably here we get to see her most rational self at work, which aims to find balance by experimenting with volumes and textures, at the same time she shapes stillness and kinetics, while paying close attention to the effects of the shadows her pieces cast.

Oppositely, or rather as the other side of the same coin, her aesthetic search follows the path to the opposite direction, the readymade. The artist retrieves and collects objects no longer functioning, sometimes mere fragments and sometimes cast away materials. With them as a starting point, she ensembles and brings to life new shapes, resignifying each piece, but also granting them a particular symbolic character, sometimes with personal reminiscences and some other times with more recognizable, explicit references. The latter can be seen, for example, in “Queen of Silver” (La Reina del Plata), in which a steel wire crown rests upon a Buenos Aires cobblestone. This represents the most genuine Buenos Aires: it alludes to the old town in its golden age, with broken French crystal cups belonging to an immigrant bourgeoisie that intended to remain French-like while stepping on cobblestones and maybe listening to Gardel singing “Buenos Aires, Queen of Silver” (Buenos Aires, la Reina del Plata) or “The broken cup” (La copa rota).

Walter Gropius said that the basis for every artist is a good artisan’s basis, and María Emilia certainly puts that to the test, showing that her work sheds light on sculpture marching towards the objet trouvé at the same time and place in “Gathering of the Retrieved”.

By Eugenia Garay Basualdo, curator of the solo exhibition at the Cooperation Cultural Center (Centro Cultural de la Cooperación), Abraham Vigo Ward, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2015).