NATURAL IMPRESSIONS

RUBEN MARROQUIN
Brooklyn, New York, USA
SONORAN MAJESTY, PUNTA CHUECA, 2022
Mixed media
8 x 20 ft (243.8 x 609.6 cm)
Textiles and technical possibilities
offered in weaving are the foundation of
Ruben Marroquin’s work. His art aims
to revisit, appropriate, and reinterpret
certain languages, traditions, and art
historical movements, formalizing this
pursuit through the act of weaving,
an ancient craft of tribal societies.
From this combination of interests,
the artist develops a contemporary
proposal with resonant echoes,
where the acts of weaving, spinning,
braiding and interweaving surpass the
category of the craft. Past, present
and future converge in his body of
work, generating new inquiries about
the formal possibilities of materials to
create sculptural pieces. Time layers
overlap, transversal, interwoven,
and polysemic, and through these
connections, an ancient practice is
valued and updated.
Marroquin’s work is rooted in research,
exploring the resizing, questioning, and
reinvention of the possibilities offered
by textile materials and processes, as
well as reflecting on the opportunities
for contemporary creation provided
by this tradition. In this way, the artist
establishes two closely interconnected
registers bound by an inevitable filial
connection: on one hand, the material
and its ductile possibilities, and on the
other hand, the creation of a body of
work that links fiber art with abstract,
constructivist, gestural, and organic
practices. In this operation, Marroquin
does not produce utilitarian objects
with symbolic resonances like tribal
societies, but rather two-dimensional
sculptural works in which the act of
weaving loses its craft connotation,
updating itself and establishing new
formulas or drifts that engage in dialog
with contemporaneity.
For the construction of this pieces,
Marroquín employs assemblage,
seeking to create volume to overcome
the flatness of the two-dimensional
format. He attaches, sews, knots, or
adds various structures such as split
bamboo poles, floats, lifebuoys, or any
lightweight object found. From there,
the artist employs the classical visual
expression alphabet: line, stroke,
material, texture, form, color, space,
movement and rhythm. The operation
consists of covering that volumetric
structure or skeleton by enveloping and
layering threads. He encases and lines
with fibers to create textile pieces of
a sculptural nature, where movement
and organic elements gain ground. The
results are three-dimensional, gestural,
expressive, and lively tapestries in
which the artist enlivens the support
by playing with the formal elements of
visual composition.
His artistic world gallops from the
purely abstract and constructivist to
the organic, expressive and vital.
His trajectory is characterized by
experimentation and the intersection of
currents and languages, drawing from
elements and practices of visual arts
as well as manual and craft arts. These
are vigorous, powerful, evocative
pieces with sensory, manual and tactile
resonances that increasingly demand
medium and large scale supports
capable of containing their force and
the impetus of an unstoppable drive.
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