Mariana Sissia

Although not as romantic as the members of the volcano School (an improbable group of painters who settled in Hawaii during the XIXth Century with the purpose of portraying some exciting volcanic eruptions), Mariana Sissia ́s drawings ascribe to certain tradition that extracts dramatic potential out of mineral. Outstanding technical skills applied to excavations, cracks and faults, equals her output to studio graphics produced by certain scientific disciplines as stratigraphy or topography. And though the artist has stubbornly decided to set tramps and detours within her landscapes, the possibility of containing graphic information make her drawings as fiable as any satellite image. After taking a university course on painting at Rosario, a traumatic period in Sissia`s life overcame when se had to adapt to Buenos Aires way of living. This gave as result a series of works entitled Self-Defense Systems, with which she burst into Buenos Aires art scene in 2009. This group of graphite drawings plenty of details showed isolated plots of land, incalculable deep holes, cordoned off excavations sites; islets of ground transversally cut that revealed subterranean tubes. It was, in sum, a collection of incisions on the landscape`s surface, done with the purpose of avoiding any threatening element against emotional comfort. Works seemed to be distant and unexpressive, in tune with the harshness of her technique and its laconic, slightly sarcastic, slang used to name the different positions of her defense systems. However, a zone of intimacy and weakness becomes evident after the appearance of certain symbolic load elements, which cannot find their appropriateness within apparently desolated spots. Slides traveling across scarps and flowing into holes; a useless seesaw that is not able to work naturally because of an obstructing mound of soil; Sissia processes earth extension so as to turn them into a playroom for a passive- aggressive spirit. They are sterile views, but altered in such way that a sort of resentment and distrust tings them. The effectiveness of these traps is yet to be proved, regarding the fact that neither human being, nor animal appears prowling around them. Maybe they fall out of use during peaceful times and were not needed anymore. The central piece of the series, Trench, is more than 4 meters long and depicts, almost as a facsimiled copy, a rocky spot in the face of which is impossible not to dwell upon for a couple of minutes. Trench condenses the long reach of Sissia ́s work and at the same time it magnifies it to a vertiginous limit. For the artist it ended up being a kind of revelation: finding herself in front of such a detail worked piece, she started to pay attention to those small features that were part of her drawings and decided to test them in order to capitalize their aesthetic value. Thus, she focused in those fragments and there she carved abstraction. Turning landscape upside down or zooming up on some small elements, she shapes a world of almost fractal geometric geology. This tendency consolidated during 2011, when she was elected to be a part of the Artists Program at Di Tella University and her work grew as it was exposed to debate and discussion in critic sessions at the University. Drawings were slowly separated from their illustrative aspect and acquired a more expressive nerve. During this time, she frequently heard Nick Cave ́s album Five leaves left, to its rudimentary made tracks, faintly arranged and with displaced sound, that became an interesting counterpoint to the preci- sion and density of her drawings. During this dead time in between goals, she ventured into video art and produced a piece entitled Excavation 1: introspective monument. There, two diggers in a small field under a grey sky, working the ground inside a space carefully demarcated with a tape measure that outlines de Word “Yo” (“I”). Although the video is over before the process is finished, the work is projected alongside a picture of the excavation once it came to an end. By this, Sissia lines up in a direct manner both to the Land Art movement –maybe with Michael Heizer as its main referent– and process and performative art that bring her work close to Francis Alys. More recently, committed to the physical act of drawing, she undertakes formal experiments where she tries a range of procedures, recurring to a radical twist regarding the way the graphite is pressed on the paper, changing the speed of traces and the angle of her graphic tools. The method prevails over the concepts and previously stipulated plans. The results of this twist are abstractions and games that the artist somehow links to surrealism. By expelling a sharp mobility within the most chromatic areas, what was solid ground starts to dematerialize; it turns so vague that it is sublimated. Variations of a weird version of technical expressionism. In the brief text that came along with River of three routes, the show that Sissia shared with Nicolás Sarmiento in 2010, Eduardo Stupía stands that her work is liberated “from all business or anecdote beyond those implied in the gaps of her action in praxis”. It is reasonable to think that this self-sufficient mark will be able to still provide material to ambitious plastic projects in the future. At the same time, it would be desirable that the artist can take her skillfully range of procedures to superiorly articulated forms of expression, transparent and forever comfortable, or so complex so as to fuel the substance of bewilderment.

What is unknown tends to seduce men and triggers exploration as a way of knowing the source of this seduction. To undertake this adventurous activity there must be a territory to be crossed by and travelled and each of us caries out the experience in a unique way. This is intimately linked with the features of the explorer and de scientist, although there is something more that has to be taken into account. This surplus consists of not only the individual style of the adventurer but the different stages of recognition to which the territory explored oblige us. Therefore, what is known as “the personal style” must be adapted to the needs and requirements of these stages, without obliterating the causes that made that search to be thought as essential. By these means, the same object can be approached in different manners, and at the same time it can be treated as an object of attention and desire. This disparity is at the end what contributes to enrich what is known within an array of perspectives. Each of this offers a different aspect, and no matter if it suppresses other perspectives, it always adds something new. Maybe two manners of picturing the same fantasy made territory provide three different ways of addressing and knowing it. That is how we might consider the works of Mariana Sissia and Nicolás Sarmiento, brought together. Both artists share the space of the exhibition that will be available until March at the Recoleta Cultural Center. Landscapes depicted by Sarmiento are drawings where the hegemony of stain and wash produce different levels of deepness. Sometimes lines are interrupted by some other illegible lines that are not capable of composing a defined outline of what is to come. Everything seems to have been made diligently, addressed with a rapid and energetic trace. As if there was an urgent will of recording in order to reach everything within this territory. As if in the next corner the latent threat of altering perception and therefore the chance of something wonderful or sinister overcoming were laying in wait. Maybe the possible encounter with others, not able to be sensed but yet known by intuition, between the light and dark that the artist manages to produce with his technique, stimulating the progress among the winding paths of those strange places. Sissia ́s landscapes, on the other hand, reveal a skillful graphite drawing technique. There, developed tonal work is evident, in addition to an exquisite –almost decorative – attentive facture regarding the reflection of every detail. To these features, one must add the variations of lights and shadows within the drawings provide them with an essential material density. Something that considering the levity of pencil it would be impossible but turns feasible because of a skillful hand, close to scientific description. By these means, her landscapes seem to have been traced out of photography. All of them have been done from a point of view slightly higher than the observer ́s, so that the result is similar to past travelers artists output, whi used to register the exact topography of a territory aimed to be recognized. Like them, the artist gives form to perfectly identifiable spaces, where the presence of man is revealed, although his figure has not been drawn. The tracks of actions he is the only one capable of undertaking, alongside some tools for those activities, narrate his perfect control upon these explicit items. Sarmiento and Sissia, each in their own way, offer a personal route to follow in order to go along the same river. What is, then, the third route to which the title of the exhibition alludes? Perhaps, the story of man conquering one among many territories of Earth. And in that story, as if everything was about a time line, Sarmiento and Sissia are two different moments in it. The first appears more or less misty and chaotic. A kind of primal incursion in a rough, wild and virgin area, where nothing is clear even though one stares at it. The second, on the other hand, already studied and researched, not only geographically, geologically but even botanically, is perfectly ordered, allowing us to recognize and to name everything there. It evidences new incursions and at the same time denounces the hand of man.

There is a hypothesis that suggests that everything in the world is socially built. Not only the use, the classification and interest we might stamp on them but their very same being. Something is as long as I have named it. Thus, I am not only a passive receptor or slave of mi passions, but an active producer of structures aimed to be in contact. I speak to understand the world and my experience in it. I construct systems: one word in top of the other so as to build an argument that helps to think myself in the universe. A mountain of thoughts and all my life spoken out, so as to set scaffoldings, vanishing points and finish lines. In this way, Mariana Sissia conceives her works as geological layers. In the history of her schemes one is able to read the sketch of a biography that is eloquent, not secretive. Her extremely worked drawings seem to be carved in empty wasted spaces. Each atom of her landscapes is the constitution of a world attached to depressions, impossible elevations, and a timeless and inhuman scale. Mariana essentially funds a world of her own, as stands in the title of her work: “Self-defense Systems”. But, why hiding when there is no one there to threaten us? Maybe, because the most indecipherable fear is the one that inhabits us. In front of ourselves, we find no possible defense, with nothing to say. And saying, precisely, is one of the most radical acts of self-exposure. Mariana`s drawings speak with an overwhelming power. Where everything seems to be arranged in order to find a metaphor, we bump into an absolute truth. A precipice is an abysm, the same amount of ground needed to fill the whole lays next to it and between two mountains a trench, that offers no protection, is settled. Aristotle postulated that that poetry was geared “to mimic by different means”. According to him, metaphor was “was the only thing that one cannot take out form other”. Under this principle, Mariana depicts for herself the story of her life. She fixes a part of her history, modifies it. She creates, in this exercise, a sort of identity that protects her from memory ́s intemperance and finally draws. And in her drawings there won’t be ever a stared sky. Her universe is dessert and daunted, but there is always a chance –a diving board, a slide, trestles– a range of gadgets that open the window of opportunity and risk at the same time. Maybe, these objects are the other, entity and response to her fears. The paradise according to Zen philosophy is right here. The same thought allows us to suspect that hell is here as well. Let explore the atmosphere of Mariana Sissia ́s works knowing that art is also a strategy to defeat horror and to conquer the beauty of the time in which happiness might be a plausible episode.

As an extension in space, then, the line is also an extension in time. Not time in the sense of measurement of a finite duration, but rather time that just goes on ad infinitum. In Mariana Sissia’s new drawings Mental Landscape, we find, not a place nor even a point, but a conception in the mind. Sissia calls this series of work Mental Landscape, where the artist traces an order that one cannot quickly grasp, the order of emotions and sensations, something similar to the feeling of your own skin, your hair or your body. Sissia’s drawings are not a “thing,” but a layer of a thing that proposes an order that can be contained in paper. Their space is both physical and abstract –concerning materials and matter, and escaping precisely being a thing. Using rice paper, Sissia creates large scroll-like drawings, with extreme dedication, patience and caution. Known for its use in 19th century Chinese painting, this thin material is delicate and un-textured. Sissia starts by applying “frottage”, a graphic art technique developed by surrealist German artist Max Ernst in 1925, to create a basis for further refinement. Sissia rubs over textured surfaces, such as cement floors, walls, and stones, which she then intensifies and marks with graphite of different scales. She refers to her method as “temperamental,” slowly building a landscape that develops according to the artist’s daily energy. These passionate scenes are investigations of materials –resembling masses of air or pieces of sky, ethereal realms. Sissia’s skies remind the ones by Argentinean artist Oscar Bony in the mid-1970s. What seems to be a banal topic, the sky becomes an intense metaphor for freedom. Sissia, like Bony, cuts the skies loose, separating them from the infamous world of figures. Here, matter reaches the sort of complexity we find in the human brain. Similar to the philosophical position or the belief that conscious- ness is a universal feature of all things, Sissia attempts to extend herself into the environment and to work with its problems and events. She becomes aware of her own body, in a way that has nothing to do with the accepted idea of the self-portrait, but more with the questioning and observing of sensations. The absence of figures and human bodies in the landscapes give a sense of “loss of touch” –not only with ourselves and with each other, but also with the culture of which we are a part.

The visually delivered message plays on our experience and imagination with all the power of a verbal language, arousing feelings and thoughts, memories and fantasy, and releasing stores of mental energy. In our personal encounter with painting, there may be no need to translate this language into any other, no need to transform visual images into words. The visual image is a self-sufficient reality which verbal translation can do no better than very crudely approximate.

Jerome Silbergeld, Chinese Painting Style, University of Wash- ington Press, 1982. Earthly materials, as soon as they are grasped by curious and brave hand, awaken our drive to work them over.

Gastón Bachelard, La tierra y las ensoñaciones del reposo, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006. (English title: The Earth and Reveries of Repose.) I
The first drawing by Mariana Sissia that I ever saw showed an excavation, a seemingly deep pit, faithfully represented on the plane—that is, in the ground—at the end of a diagonal axis. Placed at a slight remove from the pit, just a little higher and to the left, was a perfectly rendered mound of earth produced by the act of digging. Beyond its quality —more remarkable still considering the young age of its author— the drawing was striking in that the natural direction of its reading seemed to go against the completed act of digging. A tension seemed to pull the earth into the pit, as if a tacit force called the earth to fill the hole back up—an effect heightened by the weight of the pit in the composition. This kinetic induction established a connection with the paradoxes of representation. Early on, then, Sissia was reflecting on the dilemmas of her métier, in terms of both the construction of the image and of the active exercise of drawing, in the form of a concealed allegory or as an intentional metaphor. Like other scenes by Sissia akin in constitution or poetics, this excavation seemed to suggest a conception of drawing as a painstaking and radically physical task operated on a surface. One advances in the drawing by grinding the material on that first outer layer, searching for a less explored hidden plane; sediment is left along the way as part of the same phenomenon, of the same figure, which is not only a specific formal presence but also an instance of visual rhetoric. A sediment that threatens at times to obstruct or to drown visibility, the breath of what has been revealed. That drawing astonished me due not only to its specific virtues, but also because it stood out from various works on paper by other young artists —as young as Mariana herself— also featured in the group show where I saw the work. Sissia’s style and graphic approach were even more striking in a wider context —the year was 2010— marked by less and less probity, wisdom, and mastery in the craft of drawing and by an endless number of faltering, rudimentary, unlearned proposals, some of them deliberately clumsy and crude. Sissia’s work was grounded in a completely different philosophy of action, one explicitly dedicated to the vocation of drawing for the sake of expressive and practical ends almost demented in the orthodoxy of their approach to the tool; she seemed to have something like pious devotion to an unwaveringly uniform and endlessly rich line and tone. And that which was so arresting at that time has continued to be one of her distinctive traits; it has not shifted or faltered since that early moment, despite various stages in her production. II
During that same period, Sissia focused on a specific set of scenes, making use of recognizable elements like water tanks, above-ground swimming pools, scaffolding, and groups of trees generally placed on blocks or large clods of ground or floating intact on the plane. They seemed to make reference to the instructive rhetoric of technical or industrial manuals in a gesture somewhere between surreal estrangement and a kind of improvised metaphysical synthesis. Some of these works proposed other variations on the gathering of ground without the aid of any accessory. A theatrical quality, dramatic tone, and concordance of other logics both progressive and destructive makes itself felt in these works with their cuts and gaps, their bite marks and plates, their rocky slopes and smooth segments, which the titles identify as tunnels, caves, caverns, walls. The artist moves skillfully between fantastical feints, insinuations, and resonances, and we suddenly have the sense we are before a protoscientific document intended to illustrate the architecture of anthills or termites’ nests; we have the unsettling feeling that we are examining animals’ dens or caves or exploring an inventory of construction sites, an engineer’s notebook. The polysemy and breadth of Sissia’s method and procedure is striking. It partakes strategically of the iconography of geology and of the speleological universe, as well as simulacra of transcriptions of archeological field notes that she recreates in, for instance, a chain of references to public installations as contemporary as skateboard parks, their tracks here turned into dried fossil remains. As they plunge into the rugged ground, these even pits and ditches are steeped in duplicity, armed with a certain objective rationality, but also infused in the dizziness of the bizarre, as if the hidden life of a concealed underworld quivered within that illusory earth. At the same time, one has the distinct impression that the one who makes these drawings does so knowing full well that her steadfast affirmation of certain figurations or contents, her use of motifs like intact or lacerated rock, perforated or solid ground, are an analogy for the endless penetration of drawing in the drawing itself, suspecting —or knowing— that man can dig in rock, but all he will ever find is the rocky. (Ibid)
The will to look inside of things makes vision sharp and piercing. It turns vision into violence as it discovers the fracture, the crack, the gap through which the secret of hidden things can be violated. (Ibid) III
With clarity and surgical precision, absolute mastery of technique, vast attention to detail and enormous productive capability, Sissia’s drawing rummages in its own expanded body. Year after year, she hones her instruments and resources tirelessly. Steadfast, she trains the subtle muscle of her sensitive repertoire, adding elliptical alterations and transfigured correspondences. In a single but twofold act, she combines legible access and uncertainty. Her frictionless formula risks with almost naturalist fluidity the synthetic incrustation of foreign agents in worn mounds and terrains. It is in this form that slides and other items from playgrounds, ladders, drains, fences, and makeshift bridges come before us and justify their role as ghostly props. In this period of her production, like its later regions, Sissia’s comprehensive elaboration of drawing depends strictly on her thorough control of the strokes —lines in, evolutions, landscapes, fillings, degrees of pressure— with the pencil or graphite bar on paper. Her treatment is geared to sustaining the dense substantiality and seamless corporealness of the planes that make up her large objects and structures. She worked for a spell on sheets of paper with plastered surfaces though the grain does not interrupt the drawing’s optical disposition. Equally effectively, she would later make the porous and somewhat coarse support intervene in the drawing as a new and suggestive textural sign. In relation to the spirit that seems to move them, though, the sharp earthy incisions and even depressions suggest precarious and primitive handiwork as well as a greater economy of means now on an industrial or project scale. Both hypotheses converge in the geometric regularity of the line in architectural blueprints, compromisingly rendered abysses while soothing foundations become orthogonal collapses in the earth’s crust. With chilling coldness, a grave appears as well as part of what might be a reference to a virtual catalogue of the cultured uses of the earth. Everything serves to further unlikely anecdotes and mild tensions. The human factor is an absent presence, and empty city lots with melancholic waste are fanatically displayed to the torrid whiteness of a plane that is territory and space as well as negative force. What stands out in this singular mix is the brutal excision, the wide and square scar that Sissia calls Trinchera [Trench]. It takes shape at the center of energetic gravity of one of the many remarkable series in the course of her prolific production. The sense of uneasiness, of an improper use of gadgets as steeped in connotation as they are dated and, therefore, useless —stuck as they are in the perpetual present of the anonymous scenes of excavation and unearthing— makes time a farcical presence; the irony of a use of time that is cultural and social, but also an anachronistic nightmare. Once subject to vital actions and movements, the situation and its parts are now frozen forever and, like a collection of urban fetishes, artificially placed on a neutral background. IV
Though resolute, the systematic change of course that Sissia begins to effect makes itself felt gradually. It entails a radical change in perspective and in the design and use of the spatial vraisemblance. Sissia will hover over craters and depict hillsides, summits, crags, and mountainous peaks as she wavers between mimesis and imaginary invention. In the smallest details of these disruptions in the land lurks the resounding transition that would irrupt in the overall conception of her project and lead her language to take root at a fruitful threshold. She will now begin to skillfully depict collapsing chalky walls, rugged peaks, and canyons and to manipulate counterpoints and combinations of networks, linear weaves, and gradations of gray embedded in evanescent layers of graphic epidermis. These deceptions exist in a limbo of sheer appearance and, hence, can be seen as organic abstractions or as a sort of solid wall that becomes diaphanous suddenly, its physiognomy unstable and shades changing. More than ever, the artist works on the basis of antagonistic structural premises as expansive as they are muddled as they encroach on the entire visual field like a pan shot. These works look like unknown cartographies, boundless aerial views of a conjectural plateau or, in more terminal manifestations, lush camouflages. The vigorous making of these works does, in fact, attempt to emphasize, albeit gradually, the grain in the tenuous vibration of the stroke on the paper or to hide it by threading together, at an intimate and steady pace, the nodules, lumps, and cells yielded by the endless workings of the pencil. The thickness, weight, and varying coarseness of the support silently bind together the whole. After all, Sissia is suspicious of anything that might be seen as a shortcut or as a facile and flashy effect. Startlingly, in these works accents, contrasts, and emphases rendered by means of frottage appear as well, orchestrated in the ecology of the whole with an inalterable organic quality. We should linger further on how Sissia crosses that vast terra incognita which, like an expert explorer, she has discovered, armed with pencils of varying gradation and with graphite wielded like arrowheads, sharp vehicles to supply a much needed dose of options and registers. There is no room in drawing —or, rather, in Mariana Sissia’s act of drawing— for turning back or for correction. Her approach is always head on as she leaps into the void without flashy acrobatics, embracing instead the challenge of constancy that affords no hesitation or scars regardless of how many precautions and decisions she may have made on how to give shape to each individual work. Sissia interrogates the appropriations, adjustments, consistencies, couplings, and dissonance of drawing, rendering with virtuosic stubbornness generative, rough, and ashy dots, segments, lines, rays, and tiny scribblings to form constellations with changing skin that can be read in turn as conjectural depth, sky, earth, pond, map, hydrographic basin, maze, wall. Her recent works go beyond that initial allure and enchantment to cross the frontier of her own ontological threshold, at once representative fiction and informalist project. The various formats of the support are shattered into extreme instances in, for instance, the magnificent and landscape -like panorama made from horizontal pieces assembled in a contingent sequence like the semicircular mirage of Claude Monet’s Nymphéas or an abstract version of the Buddhist narrative scrolls that reached China from India. Similarly, the long vertical scrolls of rice paper redistribute her work and provide another reading of the image perceived as a dissected dynamic whole rather than as a mere link on a chain. All of this entails not only a new Eastern perspective, but also a redoubled determination to test out and to experiment in terms of the internal and external dematerializations and the installation -like environmental variations these works propose. V
The notion of graspable and real time is accentuated on the cognitive level by the remarkable oneness that Sissia manages to achieve despite the radical heterogeneity of the scenes she depicts and the evident material density in each and every work. We have a sense of hours and hours spent on methodic and taxing toil, slow and demanding work that requires full attention, awareness, and motor skill. This can only be achieved by an artist well trained in navigating the relationship between creative drive, manual perfectionism, and profound subjective alertness —all of which Sissia brings together in a systematic and meditative practice. An encounter, a tension, a struggle of thicknesses and substances that ensues between the interior productive forces of the Homo faber and the limits of the expectant material. It is the resistance, the hostility of matter (Ibid) that must be brought out into the world and shaped. Inert, it is steadfastly fleeting, straining, and evading the very one who would give it origin, breath, vitality, and sensation. Sensitive avatars, amorous conflicts, sacrifices and discoveries experienced by those who, like Mariana Sissia, give themselves over to the all-encompassing monastic rite of meditated matter (Ibid) which, for her, goes beyond matter at the service of art. With such wrath imagination seeks to explore matter! All great human efforts, even when they are external in form, are harbored in intimacy. (Ibid)

It is said that during his journey around the world Raymond Roussel not even once drew back the black curtains of his vehicle. By this brief gesture he went far beyond the idea that geographers, naturalists, cartographers and artists have lent weight in the past. No matter the purpose, making a landscape was no longer enough to satisfy the will of understanding the world. No longer it soothe ethnographic curiosity. No longer it allowed determining the ranges of prettiness, beauty and sublime. Only photographic tourism continued considering landscape worthy in terms of reproduction, and not a merely incidental fact. However since Roussel’s witticism, it is not a matter of forgetting to landscape, but to search those sensitive zones where these impulses persist, where this way of visual appropriation of space still works, what configurations are the ground for these problems to appear even today? From natural space, enough codified, Mariana Sissia’s drawings take us to outer/inner space of things. Her conceptual value is to realize that what once was painters’ responsibility, nowadays is being assumed by technology, specifically, by remote sensing techniques, gadgets that pick up images there where no human eye reaches. That is why we do not know yet to what extent these satellite and microscopic images have impacted in landscape history. If this history is to be done, In other world beauty is strange, the installed/drawing by Mariana Sissia pictures itself as an intercessor, a future document, a lost shot. By bringing together the fundaments and ways of producing these images and drawings skills, she is able to avoid anecdote and display, by the same move, a panoramic view of what once was called an heterotopy: other place, unrecognizable, strange, impossible to incorporate to our human sightseeing. Indeed, if classical landscapes postulate body as the measure of space and subjectivity as its perceptive scale, remote sensing deprives this old phenomenology of its constitutive basis, there is no direct contact with the object, there is no eye observing. At the end, what is left is what was there at first: visual data processing. So Sissia operates against the aesthetic look, she turns drawing into an exploratory instrument with no intentions of reproducing landscape, but of producing it, without making drawings look alike with nature, but the other way around. Poiesis, not Mimesis; percepts, not perceptions. Therefore the technical decision is to subdue the eye, or even better, to implant in the hand an eye for its own. This inevitably postpones any sensitive act –to suggest a story, to confess an idea, to exhibit a secret- in order to put in the first place the physical act of drawing. The pencil`s angle, the speed and length of traces, the graphite ́s hardness, the opening of the lines, the use of blanks, the stratification of grey and, in a painter`s excess, the accumulation of layers. All these compose wide range of graphic procedures applied to the appearance of forces, intensities, rhythms, interferences; the track of ongoing processes, of objects that have jus disappeared, of borders that do not close on themselves. The urgency of the hand seems to be geared to prevent image from defining, none, never, as if conceding to that temptation implied to be once more in the field of privacy, of incidental, of subjective explanations. Nevertheless, drawing, its tension upon vision, its nature exposed to contingency, is always a kind of direct negotiation with immediate environment. Mariana Sissia choses to execute a disappropriation, in order to save, not the world`s consistency but its outlines, not images but resemblances, not beauty, but certain beauty.

Mariana Sissia and Nicolas Sarmiento belong to that weird group of artists -perhaps not so unusual within young contemporary artists- whose strict and rigorous approach to technique and method produce a firm commitment upon detail, shown in their works, providing them on one hand with an essential material density of the uses and questions postulated by their languages and on the other hand, liberating them from any business or anecdote beyond those somehow implied in the gaps of her actions in praxis. Sissia shows on the first look a kind of affinity with the iconography of geology, geography and botanic text books. This is immediately obscured by the increasing abnormalities of her construction, apparently so logical and solid. The virtuosity of her tonal elaboration and the intimate balance between artificial and natural appear in her drawings producing a quiet seduction, a mysterious power. Sarmiento registers and detects, which equals to invent, the protein manifestations of a graphic energy that can be displayed as a kind of rough primal proto-scripture or as a delicate beat of stain and wash. His endless system beholds the aridity of what appears as pure body of illegible line and plan and at the same time as the luminosity of what opens in a nutshell in front of our eyes with the magnificence of a fatuous tale. Eduardo Stupía.

A plane power. A ghostly density of plane power. A more expanded density, less expanded (more or less expanded), but always in an extension plan. A basketball court with all the players lying on their backs and, apparently, without moving. Are they completely still? It seems so. (Are they on a break, in a half-time? We cannot be sure about that) As spectators, we try to find the ball. It is wrapped in a silk scarf. (Behind, there is an opened window. A window without glasses and no sound comes out from it.) The ball is hidden and, since it is a basketball tournament, the players lie inexplicably still. But if we focus our camera and zoom in, we would have a revealing view: the players give in to small pleasures, move their eyes in a circular way and they stroke the parquet flooring with their fingertips. Slowly and rounded. Registered under this sign: Half the energy
In life
repeated many times


(That is the mantra repeated internally) Perhaps the spectators start leaving. And it has to be quite clear: these basketball players do not want to attract anybody, and in no way they convince us that what they are doing has to be entertaining for everyone. So, if someone stays, if days go by and someone continues observing this almost imperceptible game, the players turn 25 degrees, wink at the grandstand and those who were spectators are now part of the team. That’s the way they move around. Ghostly densities in a sectarian game. A crowd of tiny insects on a vine leaf. Each one is a thousandth of a millimeter. The vine leaf is covered by insects on one side. On the other side it is completely naked. Why did they stay on that side? Why did they choose that leaf? Why is it so difficult to understand what they are doing? Are they eating? Are they sunbathing? –We are hot! –says the smallest one. –We are sunbathing! We are here for other reasons –answers a voice –We are scientists! We have a microscope! If there is no movement, if we still do not understand why they are all together and looking at the same side, we do not care! And if we do not reach a conclusion or we reach a wrong conclusion, we do not care either! We neither have theory nor enough preparation to make a hypothesis and we do not care. We do not care about anything! The only thing we want to see is that image amplified!

“Sin ser una cosa extensa, el pensamiento tiene su extensión y se extiende a su manera, que consiste en no llegar nunca a estar extendido.”


Marie Bardet Minds less brilliant than René Descartes have often mistaken the terms of his celebrated distinction between thought and the extended thing. The fact that the RES COGITANS is never an already extended RES does not mean that it does not extend. But thought –perhaps unlike matter– extends endlessly with no boundaries, delimitations, or destination. Borges asserts that “the terms of an infinite series admit any number,” and that “If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.” Happen what may in the external world of bodies, this is precisely what happens within the realm of thought. Mariana Sissia understands this clearly, distinctly. Her landscapes are landscape of the COGITO, of the mind engaged in the act of thinking. There is no room in them for references, cardinal points, or geodetic coordinates. They contain no up or down. The fact that, in them, any attempt at cartography or navigation is doomed to fail does not means that the artist does not turn to those terms as concepts in an image potentially endless as well. What the image depicts is a possible world never given over to the experience of the senses. Her —slightly dreadful— interest lies in the enormous difficulty that contemplation entails. How to explore a lands- cape like this? Where to begin? What direction to take? Where to end? Unfathomable as material, for sensibility the landscape of the spirit is also the landscape for the spirit. Vague and incorporeal despite its undeniable consistency, the mental landscape that Mariana shows extends perhaps to the limits of the perceptible but not beyond the limits of the thinkable. Not yet extended, it extends precisely in order to be thought, indefinitely and endlessly by those who take on this arduous act of contemplation.