The Museum of the Americas presents the exhibition entitled: On the anthology of time By artist Marcos de Jesús Carrión. The artist, born in San Juan and raised in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, presents a series of prints created using the non-toxic silk aquatint technique.

“Through these works, I propose to take the printmaking to another space, removing it from the frame, from the delicacy of the paper to give it a new space and other dimensions. Within these works, I create a connection between the visual object and my perception of time. The characters in these works are based on photographic references I take from the people around me. Many other elements are memories, stored memories that seem to have no time left. From here begins the construction of these images of the very thing that tells those stories, which are then transformed to remain imprinted in a new time.”

Marcos de Jesús Carrión He graduated from the Interamerican University of San Germán, where he earned a master's degree specializing in engraving. He has participated in international exhibitions such as the International Graphic Triennial in Bitola, Macedonia, 2009, The Americas Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Prints in Iowa USA 2010 and the 5th International Gravura do Douro Biennial in Alijo Portugal, 2010, among other important events.

Drawing, engraving; time and memory
By Marcos de Jesús Carrión

Within my work, the printmaking technique is not limited only to its ability to be multi-copy. This is where I begin to play with creating that link between the printmaking technique and drawing. My images are engraved with an interplay between needle, burin, and brush; pure lines begin to construct the image. The drawing begins with the same process of creating an engraving: the line begins to be drawn by the burin, needle, and other tools on the same materials I use as a master plate in the printmaking. Drawings conceived as prints but without the possibility of being printed. My prints, on this occasion, come directly from their master plate to be printed on the transparency of another support. Other times, they move away from the delicacy of paper to adhere to metal or plastic plates, to be completed by the drawn line and together, in a mixed media, form a whole.

I see printmaking and drawing as having the ability to imprint an image on a time, to bring back a memory. The perception of a time gone by, which can only be accessed again through the memory recorded in an image.
In constructing these images, I narrate a time, and with another perception, I construct a different one. My perception of time expands, changing and transforming into something else. The characters in my work sometimes speak of their memories, which are nothing more than invented stories containing the most significant elements, and reconstruct that time in which they see themselves as just another character in the story. I present my own perception of time, even that of others, which could be the same, subject to an infinite number of interrelations, which makes its passage a unique reality, meant to signify merely everyday events or situations.

My work was inspired by experiences, memories, and the different ways we perceive this idea, creating a space where they insist on not disappearing. Memories that I refuse to lose, so each work becomes an attempt to witness that time that is gone, that time past, because once it is no longer remembered, it is over.

That time, those events are the narrators and motivators of my artistic production. Theoretically speaking, John Dewey explains this best when he says that “what happens in the past is relived in memory”.

Memory is the instrument used to construct the past and give it space again in the present. My work, wherever possible, records that process.