#35: El Pato (The Duck) 2008

Marina Pallares made this small-scale artwork, an image of ‘The Duck’, perhaps using ink on paper. I imagine the artist sitting in a cafe, with an image in mind. A duck maybe seen through a window, the light catching on water? The bottles and those starbursts, and the circles… I can feel the artist’s hand moving across the surface, spontaneously but with purpose. Those concentric circles and radiating starbursts have a mystical feel, don’t they? And the bottles… could they suggest a quiet narrative, or a subtle critique of domesticity and the everyday? Or maybe it's all a dream-like vision, where memory and imagination intertwine. Pallares is part of an exciting community of Latin American women artists. Their work resonates across time, reminding us that artists are always in dialogue. Painting becomes an act of opening up possibilities for the viewer, and the painter.