From: Jorge Macchi
Subject: thanks
Date: May 20, 2014 10:26:37 ART To: Marcela Quiroz
dear Marcela,
yesterday I received your note in Artforum magazine and I was truly impressed. It’s not only that I like the way you approached the exhibition, but I find fascinating the relationship you established between the paintings and the work Parallel Lives. As perhaps was perceived in the conversation at the opening, it is not my obsession to create bridges between different types of works or different periods of my production (I suppose, perhaps naively, that these relationships are established naturally and beyond my intentions), but this relationship you found makes me understand something that was very clear to me at the moment of painting, fundamentally the coexistence of gesture and control.
I hope we stay in touch.
I send you an embrace and again my thanks.
Jorge
From: Marcela Quiroz
Subject: Re: thanks
Date: May 20, 2014 13:44:00 ART To: Jorge Macchi
Dear Jorge, it gives me immense joy to receive your words.
If you allow me, I would love to tell you, anecdotally, the process of arriving at that encounter or relationship I drew with Parallel Lives (a work of yours I have spoken about often in several graduate seminars and personally, my “favorite” — forgive the perhaps childish term — within your body of work).
It turns out that when I learned that you would be doing this exhibition at MUAC, I immediately proposed it to Artforum — something I never do, proposing to review a show without seeing it first — but you must know that I trust you blindly and the trajectory (which I have followed closely) of your work.
Well, the day of the opening arrived and when I entered the gallery I was absolutely speechless. Then, during your conversation with Cuauhtémoc, my fears grew, as I couldn’t find a way to relate to this so different creative approach of yours. So I returned to that room several times, always with the same result. I entered, I was left stunned without really knowing why, but completely mute, something that also does not happen to me with artists I admire as much as you.
I spent several afternoons of anguish in front of the screen, also a very uncommon attitude for me, until one morning I understood the answer, or rather, I found the entrance that allowed me not only to understand these paintings coming from you, but the possibility of relating to them intensely and intimately. It happened when I remembered my sensation and deep bodily connection condensed during the hours I spent in front of Parallel Lives in Los Angeles. I won’t bore you with my personal story, but I cannot separate my writing from it, so I would like you to know that my understanding of letting go and the imposed and often desired control, was what finally allowed me to see in your paintings what, in them as in the broken glass, reflects exactly my daily life.
Eleven years ago my spine broke in half; I was literally split in two. Among many non-visible post-surgical side effects, I have chronic pain ranging in intensity from strong to incapacitating, let’s say, with which I have tried to learn to live since then. So that struggle you speak of in your pictorial process resonated in me with such force and clarity because it is precisely my day to day, hour by hour, since the moment of the break.
Like you, I am also not interested in nor do I usually seek anchors or linear trajectories in the unfolding of the work of the artists I am passionate about and choose to write about; but when I returned to your exhibition with Parallel Lives in mind, everything became clear and there was no longer — at least in my view — any way to separate that evident bodily-gestural struggle confessed on the canvases and anticipated unintentionally, as you well point out, in that pair of broken glass pieces.
Thank you again for your response and of course, I would love for us to stay in touch.
a hug, Dr. Marcela Quiroz Luna
