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Mexican Daedalus
Javier Marín: the Open Veins of Latin America
JAVIER MARÍN: THE OPEN VEINS OF LATIN AMERICA
Giorgio Antei“I do not want them to cover his face with handkerchiefs / so that he may get used to the death he carries. / Go, Ignacio: Do not feel the hot bellowing. / Sleep, fly, rest: Even the sea dies!” These lines appear in a poem written by Federico García Lorca in 1935 to mourn a dear friend. In looking at the sculptures of Javier Marín, the poet’s verse comes to mind, the hot bellowing melding with a cry of indignant protest against centuries of imperialist ravages and murders, an acknowledgement of the open veins of Latin America. These are the works of a Mexican Daedalus, dreamlike legacies of titanic battles and angelic revolts – fragmentary and impoverished yet simultaneously noble and bold. Marín’s sculptures reflect the traumatic scars of Hispano-Mexican civilization, born not of a grand foundation but an unavenged destruction.
