Mariana Monteagudos´ solo Show

Narcissus´ Mirror

Being fragile and powerful, adopting zoomorphic variants, physical disabilities, and absolutely free styles and dressings, all these legions of beings seem to be loudly expressing a sentence. All of them summarize a mutability of character and destiny which is proportional to the mutability that defines contemporary society; at the same time that they seem to challenge mystery or place themselves ahead of an unknown or menacing circumstance, they lie unarmed and frightened….
…The freedom of choice in order to develop her own search leaded her to look through the unconscious, to be in search of her inner self, arriving at the end to a re-encounter with the toy figurine. Since that time, she has comfortably experimented and studied in depth the building of a personal language, that can be appreciated in the pieces that are exhibited. 
The semantics, the meaning of each character´s dressing allows to decode a symbolism of archetypes that is confronted with standardized lines of faces and bodies,  which are hieratic and vertical, resembling a column that supports big cheek faces, faces showing an exaggerated roundness and completely expressionless eyes without membranes. ¿Idols from an exiled olimpo? ¿Which is the essence of their ambiguities? ¿Could it be the symbolic representation of the dark emerging to the light? 
Only the artist herself has given form to these beings; within their autonomy, they represent her production strategy. When she suggests some clues to decode them, she proposes us, too, to see beyond the realm of the inanimate world, and to glimpse an emotive expression in her need of showing herself, of recognizing herself in her creation. This narcissist impulse of being reflected, mirrored in her work, and of making clear its projections, is a “game” that clears up the conscious and the unconscious. This can be appreciated in the metaphor of the luminous and somber features of the characters. We could say that, in search of her own aspects at the artistic level, Mariana Monteagudo finds the certainties of a personal, precise and careful language, which is dense and structured. A Narcissus´ Mirror as work method. 

Tahía Rivero,  Art critic of the MOLAA, Museum of Latin American Art, California, USA