In 2025, the artist Maruja Mallo (Viveiro, 1902 – Madrid, 1995) used to be the protagonist of a large-scale anthology exhibition in Spain, Mascara and compas, which used to be observed on the Centro Botin in Santander and now on the Museo Artwork Nacional Re Centro de Centro de In it, Mallo is described as a surrealist painter, however… specialised critics query this id.
For instance, in Anton Reika Maruha’s documentary Mallo: part angel, part shell (2013), artwork critic Fernando Huici and historian Estrela de Diego disagree with different mavens – Antonio Bonnet Correa, Juan Manuel Bonnet, Anton Castro, Isaac, who considers our geometer Díaz Pardo extra. Likewise, on the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), curator Cecilia Alemani situated the Galician girl as a pioneer amongst Dadaist, Surrealist and geometric artists, as though it isn’t simple to categorise her in a selected motion.
Pageant, Maruja Malo (1927). VEGAP/Museo Nacional Reina Sofia Artwork Middle Common look
The purpose is to decide whether or not “surrealist” glasses are maximum suitable for taking part in Maruya’s paintings, or whether or not there are others extra suitable.
In step with De Diego, “in Malo’s case, nothing is left to chance,” which separates her from the Surrealists, who’re at all times so focused on making it seem thru a wide variety of video games. Likewise, for Huiyi, the geometric buildings that shine thru his paintings specific a positive rigor a ways from the reverie and spontaneous occurrences feature of the motion he desires to restrict it to.
Alternatively, it can’t be denied that the artist makes use of surrealist methods, if we perceive surrealism as that present of idea that mocks the prudence of the bourgeois through opposing the lifetime of the subconscious with out taboos. Let’s consider, for instance, his sequence “Sewers and bell towers” (1929-32). That is, in step with Mal, about “a dead body, a skeleton, rags and footprints” and presentations all of it along excrement “abandoned in the wasteland”.
We will additionally reside at the artist’s private aesthetics, at all times extremely painted and wearing sturdy colours that extremely joyful the creators of L. a. Movid. Or take a look at his bombastic approach of expressing himself, with statements like “I’m in touch with the Milky Way, with astrology, astronomy, science, art and everything,” which remind us of the ancient Dali.
With a view to make clear the atypical “surrealism” of the Galicians, we started through inspecting one of the crucial works from the “Cloacas and Campanarios” sequence, probably the most dreamy, in step with Patricia Molins, curator of the present exhibition: Antro de fossils (1930). In the back of the surreal facade of this portray, skeletons, ruins, dryness, reptiles… there are geometric strains that govern the composition in keeping with the golden ratio.
Fossil burrow pictured from the MNCARS Masks and Compass showcase. Reina Sofia Nationwide Museum of Artwork
On this portray, and in lots of others through the artist – comparable to Verbenas (1926-28) – spaces and issues of intersection are established the place key figures and items are positioned in order that the portray is extra balanced and organized in a classical method. This has not anything to do with the picture of the surrealist who paints guided through inspiration and dictated through the unconscious that Huici and De Diego reject.
From geometry to cybernetics
Apparently, this formal technique permits Mal to create a distance with the topic, as a result of geometry does no longer indicate a hierarchical or authoritarian studying, so standard of conical standpoint: not anything is imposed, the whole lot is proven on the similar distance. The figures go one some other and adapt, as though geometry is a method of making an egalitarian and at ease house for imaginative and prescient.
Residing Nature III, Maruja Mallo, 1942. VEGAP/Nationwide Museum of Visible Arts of Montevideo
On this sense, we may imagine the placing symmetry of the Nineteen Forties Nonetheless Lifestyles sequence and The Head to be Mal’s actual eccentricity relatively than the paintings’s theme or dreaminess. For instance, there’s a 1943 Nonetheless Lifestyles by which two crimson roses are equidistant from an axis of symmetry that may run vertically in the course of the middle of the composition and can divide each figures into two oddly equivalent halves. The similar factor occurs within the Human Deer (ahead), from 1948, with the cash of the younger girl. However such pronounced symmetry turns out extra standard of mechanical paperwork than of dwelling beings.
From this standpoint, Mallo can be a cybernetic artist. This is, she is focused on that type of conversation between the dwelling and the inanimate that perceives nature as a perfect mechanism.
However shall we additionally describe her as a pop author. In spite of everything, in his jock sequence, each women and men are as highest, stereotypical, and humorous as Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae from Al Cappa’s Nineteen Fifties comics. Or can we relatively imagine the sequence of mask and bathers to be relatively naive, for the reason that there’s no standpoint and that the impact drives the composition, as occurs in kids’s performs the place the loved figures are as giant as properties or mountains?
Maruja Malo, Self-Portrait with Seaweed Cloak, 1945 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
We may even prohibit Maruha Mallo’s algae-blanket footage taken in Chile with Pablo Neruda within the Nineteen Forties to Land Artwork, an inventive motion that creates ephemeral works in nature with discovered parts and is documented thru images. Or will have to they be incorporated within the box of efficiency?
As you’ll see, it’s tough to search out only one creative development that will outline Galician’s paintings. Of the a large number of glasses that shall we use to inspect Maruja Malo’s paintings, my favourite is the “cybernetic” one.
Her interest about geometry guides her unprejudiced belief and permits her to precise a internet of emotional, cultural, ecological, feminist, political relationships… with the whole lot in her trail, corporeal or incorporeal, animate or inanimate. His works keep up a correspondence cybernetically as a result of they unlock tips introduced into house in order that surprising communications with minerals, crops, animals or other folks get up. Those photographs turn on consideration, relatively than seize it, and thus organize to create an opening for one thing unplanned to look.
