Concha Martínez Barreto at MARCO of Vigo, Spain
10.07.2023
Opening of "Cuando acaba el día" at the museum
The work of Concha Martínez Barreto (Fuente Álamo, Murcia, 1978) is an intense reflection on the fragility of memory, and at the same time on identity itself, intergenerational connections, death, and oblivion.
Using different techniques and media, he investigates the past, not as an impossible attempt to reconstruct what has been lost or as an arid work of cataloging, but rather as a task that precisely reflects the difficulty of all remembrance, the importance of showing the fragments, the traces left by time.
Cuando acaba el día is a project about the texture of time and its circularity, in which, from some germinal images such as the passing of days, games, or the search for shelter, the artist constructs a universe that tries to reflect the depth of the present. The day that ends the title does not refer, then, to the idea of an end, but to the opening of a nocturnal time in which many things return: the past, childhood, dreams, nightmares, the hidden.
This project conceived for MARCO is the most ambitious in Martínez Barreto's career and is articulated, as usual in his exhibitions, through pictorial, photographic, and sculptural works. As for the paintings -an essential part of her oeuvre-, the exhibition presents newly produced works that serve as a sort of common thread between all the pieces.
In the artist's own words: "Childhood, the passage of time, illusions, fears; everything in them - even their incongruities, the strangely reconstructed bodies... in short, what does not fit - refers to a poetics in which time does not end, but rather constantly returns and reactivates itself".
