Mariana Sarraute, born in 1971, grew up in Barcelona and studied Fine Arts. She is currently working in Mallorca.
She conceives her pictorial work as a kind of stairs that lead the viewer into the emptiness inside the painting. The space generated is deep, light and transparent, where all times are compressed into one, resulting in a map of the times of the process, the movement and the eternal dialogue of the painting. The freshness, transparency and lightness of watercolor on paper are characteristics that we can find throughout Sarraute’s work on canvas. The strokes are important constructors of her images, derived from the artist’s interest in the line as a drawing element for the representation of the world, although in Sarraute’s pictorial process there was a collapse of representation.
In his latest series, the narrative opens up so much that it almost disappears, giving way to the alchemy of color, where a deep space and a multiplicity of lines and pictorial planes are orchestrated as the CREATOR CODE of the image. In a way, Sarraute expresses himself in these pieces as a programmer who paints, or a painter who programs.
The incidence and reflection of light on the color and the movement that this generates in the image are an important element in her work. Sarraute hoards jars of color, almost like a color collector, which she unfolds in cheerful, vital and risky compositional proposals, playing at balancing shrillness with silence, seeking in her canvases the vibration and impact of the RGB color typical of the screens of our devices.
Mariana Sarraute has focused her work in recent years on a series of paintings resulting from her research on aspects of the Occidental esoteric tradition such as Kabbalah or alchemy. These references have accompanied the artist throughout her practice, and are translated into a pictorial body that stands out for the use of pigments that generate transparencies and chromatic games, giving rise to a fragile harmony between the space of the canvas and the artistic gesture.