Gods and Monsters an interview with Marina Vargas

Rajesh Punj

Artist Louise Bourgeois said of her suspended objects in space, that they were about the “fear of falling,” admitting “horizontality is a desire to give up, to sleep, verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence.” For Spanish artist Marina Vargas, Bourgeois’ creative candidness has proved a heady elixir for the manner in which the French artist treatedthe greatest torment of all, death itself. By which Vargas appears devotionally driven to critique the industries of our energy whilst we are alive. Beauty, instinct, violence and faith, as well as “the symbolic, the mythological, the sacred and the religious, belong to that visible, invisible world.” As the physical affairs of our lives are absorbed as much by the imposition of an act of violence, as our unflinching faith for gods and monsters. Critically
everything for Vargas comes as a perverse consequence of our dedication and ultimate devotion to life, as our encounters with ‘sleep’ or death are manifest through our engrossment of human magnificence, malevolence and everything sacred.