Synkroniciti is excited to welcome Mexican surrealist painter Mercedes Marin Giménez. Cuervo (Crow), is painted in oil on newsprint and is linked ekphrastically with Brian Duran-Fuentes poem Corvus morbidi, published in “Haunting” in Spanish and English. The poem describes a dreamy, vaguely nightmarish vision of a murder of crows. Mercedes’ painting of a single crow occupies the same primal and mystical space. The naturalism and realism of the crow, beautifully detailed and textured, melts into colorful abstraction (those bright colors appearing as highlights in the muted color palette of the bird), then into the newsprint. This Cuervo is both a object of beauty and a mystical entity or avatar, a “fire blast(s) roosting on the Bermuda grass.” There are connotations of death and something supernatural lingering in the form of the bird.
View Cuervo alongside Corvus morbidi in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/. We will be featuring more of Mercedes’ work in “Identity,” where we continue to explore her blend of magical surrealism and nature.
Mercedes Marin Giménez was born in Mexico City’s inhospitable environment in 1986. Fascinated by shapes and colors around her, brushes, crayons, markers and creative materials accompanied her throughout her childhood. She began artistic training in the picturesque town of Tenango, Morelos, which served as an open-air workshop. The life of the countryside, its particular rhythm, aromas and sounds, transmuted the chaotic urban images of her youth in Mexico City.
Her inspiration is born in the braying of a field donkey, settles into the fluttering of batwings in the early morning of an unrepeatable starry night, and dies in the strident sound of minibuses at Aculco Station.
Her paintings have matured into irrepressible explosions of color, inviting us to explore Mexican imagery from a new magical-surrealist perspective.