Jorge Luis Marrero, After Portocarrero, 1999
Acrylic, charcoal and pastel on canvas
55 X 74 cm
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Jorge Luis Marrero was born in 1970 in Havana, Cuba.
He studied at the Institutio Superior de Arte (ISA), Havana. He has had solo shows in Havana, at Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, 1999, and at Galería Habana, 2000/2002.
He has participated in several group exhibitions including "Ventana hacia Venus", VII Bienal de La Habana, 2000; 'Havana Nagila/ Cuba-Israel: Dialogue', Centre for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel 2000; 'Cinco continentes y una ciudad', Museo de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, 2000; 'New Cuban Art in Hamburg', International Art Fair, Hamburg, 2001. Shown by Galería Jacob Karpio at Art Chicago and Art Miami, 2001.
Jorge Luis Marrero is represented by the Galería Jacob Karpio in Art Chicago and Art Miami, 2001.
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Artistic Approach
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Jorge Luis Marrero, Como es arriba es abajo, como es abajo es arriba, 1999
Installation: heavy-gauge wire and pencil on paper
Jorge Luis Marrero, Como es arriba es abajo, como es abajo es arriba, 1999
Installation: heavy-gauge wire and pencil on paper
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"Jorge Luis Marrero's work has based itself on the appropriation of images. The young artist began by doing drawings (and also some paintings initially) based on the work of Roy Lichtenstein. In reality, what he carried out was an inversion of the working process of the aforesaid pop -art classic. The latter appropriated fragments of comic strips to produce his paintings and drawings. Marrero, to the contrary, appropriated these works in order to make drawings in comic form.
[...] After all those feats of Zen exercise with Lichtenstein, the artist went on to reproduce his childhood drawings, kept until then by his mother, with merciless exactness. He draws them anew on canvas or Bristol board, on a bigger scale, and exhibits the original drawings together with the copies. Thus does Marrero appropriate himself. But... is the artist the same person as the child? As well as stressing identity as a dynamic, changing notion, the artist must engage in very careful, concentrated work, in order to produce again those drawings which had sprung spontaneously from his infant soul, and this lends emphasis to the distance between the two. Though it is here a matter of reproducing exactly, and despite the fact that it is the same person who copies and his copied, all of this work is about distance, change and difference: distance change and difference between the original and the copy, between the child and the artist, between an ingenuous expressive game and a conceptual proposition, between children's drawing and gallery art.
[...] (In) some of the most recent works, Marrero uses heavy-gauge wire to copy his own childhood drawings. This step increases the distance between original and copy, dramatically increasing the scale, radically differentiating the material and the technique, and underlining the difference in aura between the childhood drawing and the gallery piece. Moreover, the reproduction remains ambiguously midway between drawing and sculpture, whit two dimensionality being retained in a work of a sculptural type. The character of the work emphasizes the transition from "low" to "high", which reverts Lichtenstein's working procedure. In Marrero's work, the copy is the main bearer of meaning, and it also the fetishized original in museum and gallery. The representative potential of drawing is here used "ab absurdum", in a feat of self-representation which I have previously referred, dramatizing the ambivalence inherent in the act of representing. Additionally, there occurs what we might call a suicide and resurrection of the author, who kills the myth of originality by copying himself, coming back to life in a work, which emanates from itself."
(Gerardo Mosquera, Extracted from the catalogue of the exhibition 'Cinco continentes y una ciudad' (Sección América), Mexico City, 2000)
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Jorge Luis Marrero on the Web
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