Artist Statement

My work is informed by the forced diaspora of Venezuelans, which has been ambiguous, chaotic, and gradual since the 1990s. As an exile and artist I use abstraction to explore themes related to loss, memory, displacement, and the reconfiguration of identity as one assimilates into a new culture and regains a sense of footing in the world.

I use color, line, shape, and the processes of layering, obliterating, and recomposing elements to make paintings that embrace haphazard beginnings and encapsulate the act of making as a marker of time. As I begin each painting, I am interested in an experiential exploration, creating compositional obstacles as each color and shape bump against one another. Color, line and shape relationships need to be worked through and recalibrated as these convergences take place.

Abstraction helps these explorations because within its own internal order, it allows for disorder, ambiguity and unpredictability. The use of vinyl emulsion, which is a high viscosity paint, and the rendering of vibrant, puzzle-like compositions become formalist metaphors in the search for thick, compounded narratives.

I continually work towards creating paintings which convey a paradox wherein instability and stability can coexist, reflecting on the disruptions that follow migration— especially when provoked by political, social, and economic instability. The use of highly pigmented color in these paintings bear witness to the pursuit of emphatic expression, transcending the bounds of restraint and silence to which migrants and women are often subjected. They become a container that hold the intricacies and amalgamated nature of my diasporic experience.

Brief Bio

Marinelly is a self-educated painter, holds a PhD in Cognition, Communication and interculturality from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. She is also is a 2024 Hambidge Fellow and a 2025 Edge Award Finalist.

Selected Exhibitions

2024 | Beastiario | Ger-Art Gallery, Atlanta, GA
2024 | X+X+X and so forth | The Canopy Gallery, Chelsea, NY
2023 | Little Things | Swan Coach House Gallery, Atlanta, GA
2023 | Timidity Creates Nothing | Echo Contemporary, Atlanta, GA
2022 | Co·te·rie | Gallery 378, Atlanta, GA
2022 | Matri-ARC | Spruill Gallery, Atlanta, GA
2019 | Hambidge Auction | The Works, Atlanta, GA

Beginnings

In the early days of January of 2016 while visiting an art galley during a family trip to ring in the New Year, I came a across a series of collages that moved me so profoundly, that they were a stepping stone on the road towards my life as a visual artist. In November 2015, only two months before visiting this art gallery, I had defended my PhD dissertation in Cognition, Communication and Interculurality in Madrid, Spain, the culmination of an endeavor I had embarked upon years before while living in Spain for the preceding 10 years and which shaped my life and my dreams of my future life up until then.

In January of 2016,  after my husband’s work transferred us all to the USA, I was living in a wholly new environment, with a one-year-old child, and left to figure out what such dislocation meant for me. I felt that the identity I had been constructing for years had no longer any meaning in my new context. And it didn’t.

The collages didn’t move me on their own. A few months before seeing them, I had been reading Mary Catherine Bateson’s book, “Composing a Life.” Reading the book was influential in my becoming an artist. The book is a bit of a time capsule, but in it Bateson addresses the conversation around life and achievement. Contemporary cultural mythologies, would have us think that a valuable life contains aspects of linearity and coherence, and that there should be a preeminent focus on the attainment of single goals. Mary Catherine Bateson, instead insists on and reveals the subtleties of what it means to live an authentic life. She describes Composing a Life as something rather fluid, messy, filled with many contradictions and improvisational, “something crafted from odds and ends, like a patchwork quilt.” 

I found myself reflecting on my own focus on the attainment of a single goal for such a long time, which perhaps until then ended up defining my life in more narrow terms than I would have liked. I began thinking of a more expansive and ample definition of what a human life deserves to encompass. This passage in particular struck a chord:

It is time now to explore the creative potential of interrupted and conflicted lives, where energies are not narrowly focused or permanently pointed toward a single ambition. These are not lives without commitment, but rather lives in which commitments are continually refocused and redefined. We must invest time and passion in specific goals and at the same time acknowledge that these are mutable. The circumstances of women’s lives now and in the past provide examples for new ways of thinking about the lives of both men and women. What are the possible transfers of learning when life is a collage of different tasks? How does creativity flourish on distraction? What insights arise from the experience of multiplicity and ambiguity? And at what point does desperate improvisation become significant achievement? These are important questions in a world in which we are all increasingly strangers and sojourners. The knight errant, who finds his challenges along the way, may be a better model for our times than the knight who is questing for the Grail.

When I stood in front the of those collages at the art gallery, I couldn’t help but blend that experience and her words together, and see myself and my own life as infused with those properties of discontinuity, contradiction, and improvisation. And why wouldn’t I? This experience of dislocation and improvisation in the face of adaptation had been, after all, a consistent theme since childhood for me.  

So that was it. I embraced the urgent need to transform, and stepped into the threshold where I became an artist.