Mariana Sissia

Mariana Sissia —Ramallo, 1980

Mariana Sissia was born in Ramallo in 1980. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Painting from the Universidad Nacional de Rosario (1998–2003). She has participated in critiques with Ernesto Ballesteros and attended the Artists Program at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (2011–2012). In 2013, she completed a residency at the Banff Centre in Canada, and in 2026, another at Mil Gotas in Beijing. She has held solo exhibitions in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Chicago, and Beijing, and has participated in group exhibitions and international art fairs in Mexico City, Miami, Barcelona, Lima, Basel, Bogotá, and Houston, among others. In 2016, she published Mental Landscape, a book that brings together a large portion of her work. Her oeuvre explores the possibilities of drawing as a meeting ground between physical practice and psychic experiences, approaching her technique not as a medium of representation, but as a graphic action capable of enabling specific states of consciousness akin to meditation.

Her artistic practice exhibits a formal shift moving from figurative work that narrates the movements of the earth and the soil, toward a body of work where reality is dismantled, placing the focus on the concept and the very action of drawing—the result of a psychological approach to the medium. Within this framework, Sissia navigates internal tensions, at times exerting control over the medium and imposing a form upon it, and at others embracing free expression, allowing the material to expand beyond the control of her manual skill.

It is for this reason that her work can be read as a continuum, where each piece is an episode of a larger narrative. First, the material represents itself in a clear tautology: pulverized graphite constitutes the lead of a pencil and, through drawing, returns to the earth. This tautology is present not only in the correspondence between the subject and the material used to represent it, but also between the subject and the construction method of the drawing. In these works, she superimposes thin layers of graphite to avoid suffocating the surface with the pressure of the tool, thereby replicating the laminar arrangement of the carbon atoms that form graphite. Later, she uses it to rub over the stony surfaces from which it originates. In her most recent works, she uses graphite powder in liquid suspensions poured onto paper. What is revealed as the root, axis, or essence of her work is the opening of a dialogue with a dark matter: graphite, a chthonic feminine force, which is ultimately a dialogue with her own interiority.

Alchemy teaches us that working with matter is, above all, working on ourselves. In this sense, the significance of Sissia’s work lies not in the final outcome (in this case, the artwork), but in its capacity to foster processes of purification and transmutation. As Rudolf Steiner noted, "behind all things material stands the spiritual". It is in this encounter with matter that Sissia bows before the fanum—the place where the sacred is revealed.