With an exceptional pictorial sensitivity and a gaze that is as empathetic as it is critical, Marta de la Fuente has managed to establish herself in recent years as one of the most singular voices of the new emotional figuration. Her work, which is traversed by intimate observation, collective narrative and an aesthetic that is as recognisable as it is precise, is now on display in Rituales, a new solo exhibition that opens on 11th July at Paradiso Ibiza Art Hotel, and which can be visited until 9th September.
Far from any superficial exoticism or pop mysticism, tarot appears in Marta’s work as a symbolic and narrative device. It is not a divinatory art, but an emotional mirror, a shared space where individuals project desires, fears and possible futures. Each painting in Rituales functions as a fragment of that ritual: intimate sessions, covert confessions, emotional choreographies where the body and the face reveal more than words.
The scenes are full of micro gestures, expressions stopped on the threshold of overflow. Everything moves between surrender and irony, between the need to believe and the awareness of believing. “There is something profoundly generational in all this. My grandmother prayed the rosary; we shuffle cards looking for answers”. This gesture condenses the conceptual core of the exhibition: the updating of rituals as mechanisms of symbolic security. Rituales speaks of shared vulnerability, of the beauty of wanting to know – even if there is no single answer.
De la Fuente thus establishes a parallel between the inherited codes and the rituals of her generation. Her grandmother prayed the rosary; she cleans her letters with palo santo. This intimate genealogy translates into a gaze that combines respect, affection and critical distance. Marta does not ridicule spirituality, but neither does she idealise it. Her painting does not fall into mysticism or cynicism, but rather positions itself in a more complex and human place: that of someone who observes with curiosity – and perhaps a little envy – those who are capable of giving themselves completely to that symbolic ‘warmth’ that ritual gives.
A plastic experience that destabilises the traditional order
Formally, Marta de la Fuente’s proposal breaks with the traditional exhibition format. The works in Rituales can be rearranged, rotated and reshuffled like a pack of cards. This combinatory logic allows for multiple narratives, inviting the spectator to project herself and construct her own symbolic links with the pieces. The meaning is not fixed: it is constructed from the gaze, from association, from emotion.
This play of interpretations turns the painting into an active platform for emotional reading. The pieces are not only contemplated: they are felt, deciphered, used as a mirror. De la Fuente thus shifts the focus from the image to the experience, proposing a painting that does not illustrate, but evokes.
Chronicle of a contemporary devotion
The origin of the project is something of a generational anecdote and something of an aesthetic revelation. The artist recalls an ordinary evening in a Cuban restaurant with friends, when a tarot reader – Ana – came to read their palms. This almost comical scene gave rise to many of the works in the exhibition. Marta watched from the outside, between amusement and scepticism, while her friends gave themselves up to the unknown.
“I recorded these sessions. They are some of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen: my friends completely open, excited, really believing in what this woman was telling them. It was then that I understood that there was something worth exploring: that surrender, that need for hope, that invented faith that is also a form of truth”.
What could have remained an anecdote became an artistic investigation. Rituales captures this tension between scepticism and faith, between rationality and the desire for control, between emotional reality and symbolic fiction. All of this is represented with a precise technique and a warm palette that enhances the affective closeness of each scene. Because sometimes – as Marta says – ‘believing, even for a moment, is enough’.
To find out more about Marta de la Fuente click here.
Don’t you know yet the play “Anís y Chinchón” by Marta de la Fuente?
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