MARCIUS GALAN

Stagnant Water

With a gradient ranging from a dark green to a deep black, Marcius Galan presents Stagnant Water, a site-specific project in auroras’ pool. Simulating the decanting of water at the bottom of the pool, the artist modifies the environment with precision, by painting stripes of color on the white tiles. This image of stagnant water undergoes a change: instead of remaining faithful to the horizontal level, the lines that delimit these marks are diagonal. This strange variation, almost as if the center of gravity of the world were displaced, inserts the work into the field of the “impossible”.

Unlike the “Diagonal Sections”, this installation does not seek to create an optical illusion effect. The line that traced space in his earlier works, marking a chromatic difference, established a complex and ambiguous space that demanded a careful investigation by the observer in an active relationship. His practice often calls for a perception that is initially left with an uncertainty about materials but, in this case, the verification of materials is not possible through the penetration into the modified space.

Confronting the constructive element of the open-air swimming pool instead of the traditional architecture that the work used to be related, the mere figuration of a displacement of the gravitational axis of the water reverberates, consequently, in a series of factors that end up connecting a simple decision, of reduced scale, to a supposed modification of a whole physical system of the terrestrial globe.