For years I have been following the outstanding body of work by María Emilia Marroquín. She draws incessantly. Her drawings, with their expansive quality, have a magnetic pull. Charcoal, graphite and pastel are her media. The landscape of her childhood—the Argentine Pampas, the forest and the city—shape the textures and the graphic language. The themes are human development and the relationship between culture and nature. Through her large-format drawings, María Emilia Marroquín articulates a poetics of resistance in times of social upheaval and climate change. I am struck by her precise observation of the surroundings, the associated testimony to a landscape in constant flux, and its impending destruction.

For Maria Emilia Marroquín, nature is not a romantic place of longing. Nature is what is there: remnants of forest and civilisation, wasteland. Dry brushwood and charred pieces of wood serve as her material, opening up the pictorial space; as reminiscences of a once-intact habitat, they establish a connection between us and what remains to us today. The titles refer to natural phenomena, creating narrative accessibility and a recurring sense of relevance.

The spatial scope of the drawing, however, is comparable in its totality and scale to Abstract Expressionism. Standing before an oversized drawing by Maria Emilia Marroquín, the eye cannot reach its edge. The sense of the immeasurable is further heightened. With virtuosity, the artist condenses lines into a thicket. We stand before it, and with every line we are drawn into the darkness or semi-darkness. Energetic, weighty and powerfully executed, stroke by stroke, the vulnerability, danger and alienation are palpable. Drawing is immediate and leaves its mark.

Following in the artist’s footsteps means entering a space of observation and inquiry. Drawing is always also a question of seeing and thinking. The artist has begun to extend the realm of drawing into installations. The charcoal lines of the drawing emerge into the physical space as a piece of wood. Burnt wood is on display in the exhibition space, bearing witness both to the devastating destruction of the forest and to the artistic process, and referring to charcoal, the artist’s preferred medium. What she does is not a reconstruction of environmental conditions, and certainly not a restoration in the idealistic sense; rather, the artist deconstructs the circumstances and transfers them to the viewing situation. The things that her drawings bear witness to push their way out, becoming urgent. In this way, Maria Emilia Marroquín makes the path she has taken with her art visible and comprehensible. In the artist’s visual conceptual space, one of Kant’s questions stands out in particular: What can we do?

By Dr. Viola Michely
Artist & art historian, Cologne. 2025