Marta Bran (Melide, A Coruña – Spain, 1986) opens her first exhibition at Trinta Art Gallery which has represented her since last year, and she does it with a specific project entitled Picnic. Marta Bran is one of the most interesting artists of her generation with a deeply analytical work around the paint to remove it from the two-dimensional framework, providing in her art pieces several lives that combine the existence of the strange factor with a wealth of technical details and patterns that she carefully invents and applies in order to narrate unique worlds, as she had evidenced in the interesting proposal made last year in the traveling collective exhibition O bosquexo do mundo (i.e. World Sketch), inaugurated at MARCO.
The theme of the pieces that articulate Picnic, as well as give substance to the story of a personal episode in a Catalan farmhouse, acquire overtones of tribute to the pictorial tradition, that one in which the subject of an informal excursion to eat in the countryside was recurring in the imagination of Manet, Monet, Thomas Cole, William Blacklock or Henri Lebasque. An everyday scene that she has stored in her memory and just now is uncovered in the gallery room in the form of drawings, installations and video installation prepared as a collage of images and emotions that embody relations and shared moments between humans and animals, about a determined episode outside at open air, relaxed and popular; as vestiges of an action delightfully moved to the fiction of the exhibition space.
On the whole what highlights is the video installation Migas de pan (i.e. Crumbs) conducted within the boundaries of drawing and animation, in which a little girl is feeding some hens with a looped gesture, a pretext for painting, remaining in an aesthetic that refers to historical trends. The intervention on the wall deserves special attention, where a typical tablecloth in red checkered fabric and food of a picnic are translated into painted ceramics: sliced bread and slices of cold meat, whose leftovers are carried by sheep, pigs, cats or dogs made of plastic. A microcosm where art becomes a landscape structure on which the technical elements are imposed. A proposal that invites us to think happily in the transience of time and things.
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Picnic
Trinta Gallery, Santiago de Compostela (Spain).
From the 12th to the 15th of September, 2014.
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TEMPOS NOVOS 207
Art review by Chus Martínez Domínguez_ p. 72.
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