In Italy I grew up in a divided family: on my mother's side, deeply anticlerical, partisan and with a strong civic commitment; on my father's side, a conservative and devout Catholic environment, very close to the Church. I always leaned towards the former, moved by a visceral rejection of ecclesiastical power. However, since I was a child, I was fascinated to enter churches and explore the frescoes and sculptural groups; the study of art helped me to reconcile myself with the appreciation of religious art for its aesthetic and historical weight. Perhaps that is why Marina Vargas' work challenges me with such intensity: because it intervenes in this terrain historically monopolized by religious dogma - at the service of economic, ideological and colonial powers - and turns it into a space of symbolic reappropriation, of feminist mysticism, of spiritual activism.
Can the sacred be reclaimed when it has been historically co-opted by systems of ideological, patriarchal, and colonial power? How might we engage with religious symbols without reinforcing the very dogmas we seek to challenge? These are precisely some of the questions that have accompanied me in the recent curatorship of an exhibition-encounter at ADN Galeria, Connections, Relations, Revelations, starring several works by Marina Vargas: some recently arrived from Revelaciones, her solo exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, and others belonging to the private collection of Manuel Expósito, one of the collectors who has most closely followed, accompanied and acquired the work of the Granada-born artist. The purpose of this encounter was to explore the impact of these powerful pieces (which encompass such media as drawing, painting, sculpture and photography) in two different contexts of circulation: the public museum and the private collection. These questions were addressed in a public colloquium with the artist and the collector, which also revealed the sincere friendship between the two, a relationship that has lasted almost a decade.
Although I had known Vargas' work for some time, it was through this exercise that I was able to enter into the intimate mechanisms of her practice from a different perspective: following the complex forms of her pieces to their iconographic roots; remaining open to the multiple layers of meaning, without seeking to confine them to fixed interpretations; and, above all, surrendering myself to listening beyond any specific explanation, since the words of the artist herself are a valuable palimpsest of knowledge in becoming, also open to layers of meaning that come from those of us who are part of her path - which I interpret as a most beautiful act of generosity.
Because that is precisely the allegory we find in the multiplicity of references and iconographic appropriations of the sacred, articulated through the stylistic-formal structure of the baroque aesthetic that the artist has been weaving in a work deeply committed to truth: a form of knowledge that never says just one thing, an image that means beyond itself, a language of the sacred that, although historically used to discipline and punish, can also be reactivated from an ethic of revelation, of the intimate and the shared, and of a constant struggle for the reappropriation of the symbol and its meaning. Precisely, in the group of works that we present, it is apparent the critical appropriation of religious symbols, especially Christianity, from feminist perspectives, to challenge the patriarchal structures that have marked this tradition - the same ones that fueled historical processes of repression such as witch hunts or the demonization of the feminine (La Piedad invertida, 2013–2020; Las Tres Marías , 2025). The presence of astrological, divinatory and esoteric motifs also strongly appears, activated as tools to decode patterns of allegorical meaning; here we find references such as the Tarot (La luna en Cáncer, 2019; several drawings of the series La línea del destino, 2024), the Ifa oracle, in particular the Erindilogun method, typical of Cuban Santeria of Yoruba origin (Revelaciones. Odi Bara, Odi She, Obara Odí #1, 2024), or other amulets and ritual symbols typical of Andalusian popular religiosity, in which Christian beliefs and pagan knowledge are intertwined (Objeto de acción / Objeto de protección , 2022; Objeto de protección / La Virgen del árbol seco, 2024). In these works there is an intense subversion of the sacred, where the figures of the Virgin and, above all, of Mary Magdalene - a central figure in the apocryphal Gospels and emblem of contemporary feminist theology - become central: the starting point for the invocation of other female figures from the religious-spiritual sphere, but also from the social and artistic history of contemporary feminism (Yo sí te creo, 2024; La Magdalena, 2024). Finally, the biographical dimension is clearly revealed, traversed by the experience of cancer, which runs through Vargas' work on multiple levels (Contra el canon, 2021; Mère-Mer #1, 2025). Illness, says Vargas, is a teacher: it does not make you invincible, but it does make you more open, more permeable, more lucid, more attentive to the signs; it is another form of strength, another way of feeling and doing. In this frontal self-portrait, in which her own bust after mastectomy appears, the artist rewrites the canon of classical beauty from the scar, or, as Audre Lorde would say, not from heroism but from truth.
Marina Vargas dares to politicize the spiritual, not to destroy the sacred but to liberate it, to give it back its power of meaning outside the institutional frameworks that codified it. It does so by activating its own syncretism, which draws from Catholic, Andalusian, Yoruba and Afro-Caribbean traditions, tarot, apocryphal gospels, popular art, witchcraft and feminist theology. In her work, the Virgin, Mary Magdalene, angels or oracular symbols no longer illustrate a dogma... rather they invoke an affective, corporal, political and spiritual experience that concerns us.
From the formal point of view, the artist moves against the current of contemporary minimalist languages, because, far from purifying, Vargas accumulates: her work is baroque in the most vivid and symbolic sense of the term; it is allegorical, theatrical, dramatic, dense. Perhaps it is just a coincidence, or perhaps a meaningful synchronicity to be noticed, the fact that, on two occasions, Vargas' presence in exhibition halls, first in Madrid and now in Barcelona, takes place in parallel to another great exhibition that did not leave those of us who went to see it indifferent: the one curated by the great French thinker Georges Didi-Huberman, En el aire conmovido..., in which that same tension between image, emotion and action is explored, interpellating, among other materials and references, the body of the dancer Israel Galván, to talk about a political anthropology of emotion. One of the intellectual references I share with Vargas, Georges Didi-Huberman offers yet another bridge of connection to her work. In it, we encounter the telluric force of flamenco and a certain poetics of the duende - that is, a Lorquian notion which Didi-Huberman revisits to speak of ‘living images,’ those that pierce us with their emotion and confront us from the depths. As in flamenco, Vargas' works embody an emotional truth where life and death touch; works that, as in the best baroque, reveal and conceal at the same time.
From this perspective, the dialogue with Manuel Expósito’s collection gains a deeper resonance. Artist and collector share a common substratum: an aesthetic sensibility unafraid of excess, accumulation, and contradiction. It is no coincidence that many of Vargas’ works have entered this collection: not only has Expósito recognized, from the outset, the poetic force of her practice, but between the two, a kind of emotional architecture is being woven, one that sustains the works and adds new layers of meaning to them each day.
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Mariella Franzoni is a curator, researcher and cultural manager specialized in contemporary art. Trained in Social Anthropology (Alma Mater Studiorum, Bologna), Cultural Economics (Bocconi University, Milan) and Art Theory and Philosophy (UPF, Barcelona), she holds a PhD in Humanities from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and the University of the Western Cape (Cape Town), with a thesis that analyzes the intersections between curatorship, market and value formation processes in contemporary art from a critical and global perspective, with a special focus on post-apartheid South Africa. She currently works as an independent professional between Spain, Italy and South Africa, combining research, curatorship and cultural management. She is guest curator of the Tomorrows/Today program at Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2023-2025), an international and independent section dedicated to making emerging artistic practices visible and building bridges between South African artists and artists from other geographies. She is also Artistic and Executive Director of the fifth and sixth edition of By Invitation, the art show of the Círculo Ecuestre de Barcelona, where she has promoted a profound curatorial renovation, focusing the project on intergenerational dialogue in the Spanish art scene.
