The earliest memory of Marina Schroeder's relationship with art comes from her childhood, when her parents enrolled her in an art course. Her return to her origins, after a professional career as an architect in the area of ​​scenography and event decoration, took place during the pandemic, when she set up a studio in her home. The place soon became small, resulting in the need to expand outside of that space for creation and work. After a postgraduate course in artistic practices, his passion became clear.

From another point and on a path where nothing is lost, the artist reinvents her trajectory. From architecture we have the presence of materials and the relationship with forms – whether by concrete blocks, supporting walls in a series that houses much of the sculptural thought, or by Formica plates that receive acrylic paint and oil sticks. In the “Walls” series, the artist investigates layers and skins of the physical wall. In this investigation, the molds found on plywood become a central element of the work, the geography from which a thought that combines death and life originates. The layers create a chromatic cartography, deepening the relationship with shape and color. Roses also appear, delicate and fragile: as the days go by they end up rotting, evoking finitude and time. The artist's gaze subverts the ephemeral nature of the festivities and reveals the cloudy aspect of a vegetal presence that shelters as a metaphor the trembling dimension of human life.

With painting at the center, other processes of experimentation derive from his path, such as sculpture and photography. In a practice elaborated in making and research, the artist uses different materials – acrylic paint, oil pastel, oil stick, charcoal, spray plaster, resins, ballpoint pen – in relation to the landscape and abstraction, highlighting the instinctual dimension in the gesture that slips and leaves traces like a dance in infinity. His painting is forged in the attraction of contrasts and diverse visual forces that go beyond figuration and are found in the power of pictorial gestures that the anatomy of flowers can give to painting.

The fascination with the proportions, materiality and chromatic aspects of roses culminates in experimental research, such as paper made with floral waste and gestural cleaning operations that reinsert party leftovers into the scene: beyond what, like mold, seems disgusting and inappropriate, The artist's gaze focuses on the convulsive beauty that emerges from there. In landscapes originating from rot, the dimension of ecstasy contrasting with horror is revealed. From the kingdom of fungi, the artist extracts life, colors and textures and, captured by the indomitable aspect, creates, with amazement, drawings of worlds that are made from a living and ambiguous materiality. “Perfect contraries”, in the words of Georges Bataille.

During the artistic residency process – held at the André Pedrotti flower shed, where the artist returns for an immersion – new layers of her relationship with flowers are revealed: “By plucking the roses the cycle of life is established, so many layers are revealed and the mold appears, which is disgusting, but also a new life being born”. It is clear, in the residency held in the place where she worked for years, that in her creative process a memory material reinvents itself and produces a displacement of experience: looking at ruins and leftovers from parties, the artist manages to say the unspeakable and transmit the untransmittable . His gesture invites the contemplation of other aspects of the presence of things, against the backdrop of a world in constant acceleration and discarding of experience in which the dimension of ruin that constitutes us is annulled. The artist delves into dead matter and waste, establishing a poetics of remains writing a new body.

Able to create stories in the space between the hand and the eye and, in the handling of gestures, colors and textures, Marina paints what she saw and what she saw. In the singular perception of the thing in an indomitable presence, the dimension of the detail is made present through a pictorial body that hovers between the ethereal and the palpable, the volatile and the imperative. In immersion, the artist excavates materialities that dialogue with the central point of her work: the issues of time and memory. From the convulsive beauty of flowers, through botany and anatomy, from rituals that include a furious delicacy – such as the gesture of cleaning roses – she extracts a viscerality that is as contemplative as it is violent and abysmal. Marina creates an exercise in dissecting the flowers, showing the fragments as revelations of parts that reinvent a place for the wound, as a means of materializing a violence that remains hidden by the whole in an ambiguous gesture of desecration and salutation of beauty.

Color penetrates the work, from red – creating relationships between the amazement of the biological body and poetry – establishing contact between sap and blood, through white flowers with other tones, to pink – which evokes skin or blush. In some moments, the chromatic relationship appears as a kind of intensification, an evocation of viscerality, the presence of flesh and the formless; in others, with pale and watercolor tones as attenuation, but also restless and unstable. If red imposes itself as something of blood, inheritance, the presence of catastrophe, the other tones seem to seek something yet to be born.

In this connection, the artist finds diverse and heteroclite materialities and, from paintings to sculptural thinking, in an effort to enter a new space in the world, turns the body over. In a baroque figuration that shelters the art of ruin, the sketch and the unfinished, she names the work and renames herself with forcefulness and delicacy: an artist emerges and reinvents herself in the tangle of flowers and supports that retain the fragments of memory and give meaning.

Flowers in a state of decomposition bear the whole question of the wound and also of healing. According to Jean Genet “beauty is a wound”, and Marina's work finds this vertigo, intertwining the plant world and the human presence in infinite veins and multiple bodily and psychic twists.

From the flowers, your own body writes itself into the world. In her excavation – with dissections, openings, layers and cuts – the artist turns over the matter of the world and pain, and remakes the regime of visibility with empty spaces in the painting and small diffuse transparencies that recreate a place for the fog. In the alchemy between different elements, she places her finger on the wound to extract the light and dark of life. Between amazement and amazement, a work emerges that is contrary to any monumentality and presents with volcanic and determined subtlety a “real” capable of redesigning its relationship with the world.

At the end of the artistic residency, Marina reveals, from the flashes of imagery in her work, the indices of a relationship in which, combining violence and lightness, density and volatility, something overflows. Landscapes harbor reflections and transparencies that suppress the difference between inside and outside, making a dimension blossom in the image that amplifies the mystery of the apparition. Like an invitation to blur boundaries, in the midst of this concentration of life and exuberance we are taken by impregnation to the power of the world.

Marina excavates the visible and hurts the legible and, by creating a tear that takes the dimension of experience and painting to the limits where we experience an effect of vertigo that infiltrates the image, she reinvents the world and a place for herself. Like a poem by Herberto Helder, the sublime is something that is always lurking: “I know that the fields imagine their own roses. / People imagine their own fields of roses. / And sometimes I stand in front of the fields as if I were dying; / others, as if now only I could wake up. / Sometimes everything lights up. / Sometimes it sings and bleeds.”

Bianca Coutinho Dias