MARINA ARIAS

Trained in interior design, Marina Arias has developed an artistic practice deeply connected to the territory where she grew up: the city of Salta in northwestern Argentina, and particularly the Puna de Atacama, a high-altitude plateau over 4,500 meters above sea level. There, the artist found, and continues to find, a primal force, a raw beauty stripped of ornament. In these extremely austere landscapes, where wind and stone inhabit space, the land speaks on a different scale: centuries, pressure, temperature, eruptions. Her work exists in an intimate relationship with matter: living, dense matter, marked by the tectonic rhythms of geological time.

Pulso Mineral proposes a journey through forms and textures that do not aim to represent a landscape, but to embody its energy: the mineral, volcanic, and essential presence of the earth. The works that make up Pulso Mineral are born from that contact with a nature that is not offered as a backdrop, but as a body. The forms evoke vapors, salt crusts, rocky structures, saline water pools, and igneous materials. The palette earthy, greyish, oxidized, and bluish, reproduces the visual memory of these environments, while at the same time constructing a formal grammar that is, in itself, abstract and vibrant. Here, the surface is not skin, but crust: what reveals the layers of what was once fire and is now mineral memory.

Far from the picturesque or figurative, Marina chooses to work from the visceral. Her visual language, though organic, is built through precise decisions: compositions that balance tension and stillness, volume and void. This way of seeing and constructing is shaped by her experience in design, yes, but also by a sensitivity that listens before it intervenes. These pieces do not impose a narrative; rather, they summon a transformative presence that does not need to be explained in order to move.

Pulso Mineral is also a way of inhabiting time: not the immediate time of the urban, but the deep time of geology. In this sense, the exhibition functions as a kind of resonance chamber: a space where that contained energy can expand and vibrate. Since moving to Barcelona in 2022, Marina has continued to deepen this line of research, now in dialogue with a new environment that contrasts radically with the landscapes of her childhood. In that friction between territories, the stillness of the high plateau and the movement of the sea, new layers of meaning begin to unfold.