Maribel Portela
Mexico City, 1960

When I work with materials, they come alive and make me a spectator of his subversive and playful transformation: Thus, a felt canvas becomes an organic piece, while a sheet of paper becomes a three dimensional piece that when multiplied creates a “nonexistent” landscape of buds and blooms. Is it nonexistent or is it artificial? Buddhists say that whoever is able to formulate the question has the answers.

Perhaps a different way of defining the artificial has to do with the rejection of the sacred meaning of nature. The artificial changes beauty and it subtracts its mythical sense. That contempt generates utopias, places without place, poetic spaces whose plausibility and meaning arises from the change that gives them life. The utopia of the artificial is the territory of the creative pursuit, the space in my imagination unfolds. The altered nature is my nature.

To the ancient Greeks, the imagination was the language of the gods, who communicate with us through images, dreams and creative intuitions.