Chus Martínez on Mari Chordà

Painting is movement. It uses the mind as if it were technology and the eye like the dynamic interface which provides each image with rhythm, with dynamics. We should not therefore be surprised that an artist like Mari Chordà uses this medium to pursue gender issues in depth, the perception of certain organs, the sensorial universe which begins with understanding oneself, and which dives into the ocean of cultural interpretations, social determinations, the legal limits which define who we are, how we have to behave, our desire, our perpetuation as a species… Mari Chordà’s work explores the relations between shape and colour, the potential of simple elements to create powerful, erotic, even sexual images in the mind of the observer. At that time, painting is perceived like a woman herself. Seen from herself everything seems natural, simple. Outside, on the other hand, a battle is being fought. The main function of the patriarchy is to take possession of the other’s territory —whether land or a body—.

 

Mari Chordà’s visual language seems to flow organically from the canvas. Her shapes germinate. If we look closely at her shapes, the world opens up before our eyes. A genital, cosmic, Pop, but also classic opening, occupied with our desire to interpret and project, to see inside and outside the relationship between line and surface. For this same reason her work, little known by the majority, can be reduced to being seen as a specific work model, which tends to be read in a specific manner. Precisely due to her intellectual and sentimental affinity with gender equality, with the questions raised by the feminist movement, it is even more important to decline the interpretation of the work in a thousand different ways. Work which is related to the reception of Pop Art, but also to a much broader context which the world of today appears to be discovering and to which many female artists belong: Hilma Af Klint, Emma Kunz, Georgia O’Keeffe, to name a few very close by. In personal relations, and the complex issues of gender and identity belong to this universe, they are pushing us to move inside and outside speech and representation. Visual and non-visual narratives experience these emotional pressures, which make any comprehensive index or accepted classification impossible. It is supposed that abstract painting is at the same time universal and private, collective and individual. Mari Chordà draws on the pre-existing and available stock of shapes and structures. With them, she creates a language in proportion to our mental, perceptive capacities; she develops a more or less efficient “idiolect”, that is to say a code of syntactic and lexical means open for interpretation. On looking at it we should recall: any language is in itself and for itself multilingual. It contains worlds.

 

Her interest in shape is simply the expression of her passion for life.