Reliefs built layer by layer

“Painting as breathing”

Marcela Batistic’s works tell no story, and yet they say a great deal. There are no figures, no narrative. There are surfaces that keep silent and, at the same time, pulse. You keep looking at them and seem to hear a murmur, as if the matter itself were speaking.

Mixed media is only the pretext. What matters is the hand that scrapes, covers, opens again. What matters is patience, time accumulated in layers. In those layers memory appears — not the memory of an event, but the memory of matter, of life passing.

Batistic’s painting is not abstract in the sense of moving away from reality. On the contrary: it is concrete. It is the trace of a gesture. It is not about representing, but about being. What remains, after looking at them, is the feeling of having stood before something true. That is what Marcela Batistic achieves: making the invisible present, without shouting, without imposing. Simply letting the matter speak.

Pedro Roth · Visual artist, photographer and filmmaker. National Endowment for the Arts Award 2020 and National Salon Award 2023.

Marcela Batistic’s work begins as a whole, where the parts merge, intermingle and interlace over time. From the beginning, her work has undergone a great transformation of concepts, palettes, styles and movements — but above all, of technique.

Moving through abstract skies, geometric compositions, seas heavy with matter and soft washes, her sensitivity and precise, protective eye let her work reveal details that glimpse perfection within the chaos of a disordered whole. Her trained, clinical eye orders the parts of the whole, as in Gestalt.

Her path in art is restless and long. Investigative and processed. That makes her work the whole of who she is.

Vivi Julliand · Curator, gallerist and art therapist. Adjunct lecturer, MNBA Friends Association. Member of SAAP.

Marcela Batistic is a visual artist with a long career in painting. She trained with renowned artists and teachers such as Rebeca Mendoza and Vivi Julliand, and has exhibited widely in Argentina and abroad.

The stain is almost always the protagonist. A stain with strength and movement that defines and takes over the canvas. A textured stroke, worked with materials such as gesso, salt and sand, so that colour and brushwork speak and invite the viewer to become part of the composition.

Her series tell us we are before a mature artist who works colours and stains until she exhausts them, only to begin a new series. An artist in constant pictorial growth. Marcela makes poetry with the stroke, with colour, with texture and with the stain.

Daniela Pisarev · BA in Visual Arts (ENBA Prilidiano Pueyrredón). MA in Communication and Art, Complutense University of Madrid. Member of the Spanish Association of Art Critics.