It seems it is not yet time to unearth the devil, and carnival still shines high in the sky, casting a beam of light that initiates a fragmentation of the landscape—splitting it into earth and gold. What do we have to describe light and darkness if not visceral, psychic, intuitive experiences, and at the same time, nothing at all.

It is not the time of foam, and yet the jars appear scattered across the ground like traces of a time impossible to name—except as both vestige and symptom.

A name carves forms with the blade of language: it illuminates, defines, immobilizes. To dare to describe with words what is purely channeled would be a distinctly human imperfection.

In The Golden Expedition, one and multiple paths of transition are portrayed through intermittent symbols and meanings that leap like crickets from one place to another. Numbers, additions and subtractions, quantities, results, altars, candles, sanctity and paganism.

When I tried to join a video call, watching paintings and mountain come in and out of focus, I attempted to make my own calculations, to play with the numbers in an effort to understand the code the artist explains far too quickly. My first step was to count the letters of the alphabet and note the following:

The letter M of Mar corresponds to the number 13, beginning a name like a clue toward something in the making.

The nameless arcana corners you into the destruction that makes the future possible.

The first line that cuts across the plane is the guide that organizes the ones that follow, illuminating and shadowing the figures.

That geometry felt incalculable and imperfect; it plunged me into the mystery of what is to come and into faith in unpredictable fortune. When I saw the playing cards, “The Fool” appeared—the arcana without number, which in other decks is a wild card, the unnumbered one that traverses them all, like that cricket landing on the momentary definitions of language. The little dog recalls past forms with a bite.

I remembered the sound of words dubbed into Spanish in my first VHS experience: The Empress tells the human boy, “Sebastián, give me a name,” so that the Nothing does not devour fantasy. Time without that name threatens destruction, yet fearing it is also part of human imperfection. Death and resurrection require a tomb with a name and a baptism.

Mar Pérez, the artist—or “the magician”—sets out on the expedition with no destination in mind, but with faith in transmutation.

His work, developed over more than twenty years, appears and disappears, manifesting in different languages: cinema, music, theater, painting. This experimental emergence in leaps has a thread that constructs an intermittent narrative through the survivals within his own work: large planes of color, invented palettes, small corners of delicate figuration. The Golden Expedition slightly dismantles the landscape genre, veiling the representation of nature with layers upon layers of psychic landscape.

This new appearance of Mar Pérez allows for an instantaneous and liminal possibility of academic or folkloric painting—as if the encyclopedias memorized through photocopied pages had enabled a partial appropriation of painting’s official references, only to recycle them into a local anchoring that strips them of reverence and uses them to portray the fleeting loves that mark the milestones of his own story.

Color is not strategy but content: a palette of syncretisms where symbolic codes are thrown into crisis, saints mix together, arcanas unravel, turn back, insist, reorder the deck, making room for the goddesses and their folds, shaking off the manuals of interpretation. Gold takes center stage in this oscillating movement—hovering between the solemn and the kitschy. Its complicity with the most technical aspects of painting—layers and layers of glazes—becomes time itself: sheets of oil that, as they dry, conceal or reveal. The palette is a detour. Cras, cras, cras! A small mound that buries and unburies, with brown and metallic tones, floor, sky, faces, cards, hill, dog.

The Golden Expedition abandons the secrecy of Western magic and dissolves into a juice of mutation, of polymorphic and unfinished dialogues that roll and grow with the adherence of crushed cans turned into support. A paroxysm of affections and passions is veiled and unveiled cyclically, like carnival.

Ana Volonté, november 2024