Behind the Smile (2022)
Discovering intense emotions for someone else can feel like a fall, a descent into a state of vulnerability, or even loss of our own being. The exhibition Behind the Smile begins by introducing us to these emotions that urge us to let ourselves go into the hands of someone else without knowing whether it will save us or play with our sensitivity.
In Fernando Marini's paintings, photographs, and poems we can (re)encounter, through artistic representation, these vulnerabilities, agonies, and layers of human sensitivity that we tend to hide behind a smile. The exhibition seeks to demonstrate that there is a force in extracting these feelings and plating them onto canvas, in giving us permission to feel, explore, and share those emotions. It is the act of taking off the mask and allowing ourselves to demonstrate the reality of human fragility.
"Pain is an adhesive" ("El dolor es un adhesivo"), commented Fernando Marini in an interview. We humans connect and create deeper bonds by sharing our most painful emotions. By doing this, we realize that we are not as alone as it seems, that we can heal through the suffering we all carry inside.
Fernando Marini's works invite us to sit with our pain, to look at how we can let the mask fall to share empathy with others. In these works, Marini wanted to express his feelings of confusion and instability. He sought to find himself facing emotional barriers and the struggles of the ego. For Marini, art took on a greater meaning than the presentation of a final product, it became a therapeutic process. The artist begins healing by producing art and hopes others can find themselves by viewing the exhibition.
Looking back at the past, we always remember the happy. We delirium in what could be and in the beautiful moments of what was. Memory has a power; it can consume us, or it can help us heal and commemorate the moments where we feel most human.
Fernando Marini demonstrates through his work how art can be the perfect medium to release the emotions that overwhelm our minds. It becomes a therapeutic process where the final product helps both the artist and the viewers to connect and understand through these representations of purely human sentiments.
In this art exhibition we can appreciate the places where memory tends to reside in moments of passion, in hope, and in the nostalgia of memories that neither the skin nor the mind forgets. Representing memory helps us find healing; it helps us to placate the past and be able to appreciate the new moments of the present.
Artist: Fernando Marini
Curator: Jayling Drowne Rodríguez
The Behind the Smile exhibition is organized by curator Jayling Drowne Rodriguez and the Flash Gallery Committee of the Art History Students Associationof the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras Campus.