Unforgettable Mariella

Mariella Agois died this Sunday, January 21, coinciding with an impressive anthology at the MALI that covers 30 paintings made in the last 15 years. Her name is essential in our art history because she was one of the few – whatever her gender – who can be considered a teacher in Peru. This text was written before her departure and has been adapted to this new reality.

When I met Mariella Agois in the early 80s, she was – and continued to be – a prominent photographer and co-founder of the Secuencia photo gallery. From the beginning she seduced me with a work of solid conceptual investigations based on popular space. It was the Chorrillos #1 series on silver gelatin paper made between 1978-1980. I was also surprised by her ability to bring together the most prominent photographers of the time, so in 1984 I organized the ConSecuencia exhibition as a kind of tribute to all of them.

Despite a consolidated prestige, Mariella decided to specialize in painting and went to the Art Institute of Chicago, where she graduated in 1985. In 1987 she finished her master’s degree at an institution that I know well. Chicago is an exciting city because there you can appreciate the history of North American architecture better than in any other state. On those trips, I visited her in her studio and I was surprised by the passion with which she spoke to me about the painting that she developed in those years of intense learning.

Upon her return in the 90s, I invited her to a large exhibition in what is today the Miró Quesada room. Her painting marked the sign of the times: Postmodern, close to neo-expressionism, heroic and with an expansive content towards the feminine condition. From then on Mariella became an essential artist in national and international exhibitions and the curators called her to enrich her proposals with her experiences.

Although her initial impulses in the field of painting placed her at the antipodes of the Hard-Edge of the 60s, there were always elements in her work that were precursors of what would come later. Labyrinths formed with braids, squared table tops, hearts attacked by prisms and, in a certain way, we could also appreciate it in his paintings of fabrics and in the subsequent open boxes that he exhibited first in Forum and then in Lucía de la Puente.

SEE ALSO: Mariella Agois: A memorable anthology

In this way, investigations took place that showed a risk and, simultaneously, a rupture with all of the above. However, Mariella never left photography aside even though painting seemed to have priority in her aesthetic concerns. On several occasions I invited her to national and international exhibitions and her presence was sometimes pictorial and other times photographic. Her participation in the Lima Biennials and her shipments to Spain, the United States, Uruguay and the rest of Latin America were unforgettable. However, her photograph always accompanied her. She was a teacher at the Image Center and I remember very well the series “The Song of Songs” where she introduced the Braille code that she would later extend to painting and even design. I always keep in mind her participation in the exhibition on Godard that I organized at the Cultural Center of Spain. I consider it a milestone in her career. She analyzed the Frenchman’s filmography and took the most representative frames of the 6 films that Anna Karina (muse – lover – wife) made for the director. The result is one of the best sequences between film and photography that have been made in Peru.

In 2007, MALI exhibited the works of Joseph and Anni Albers, containing their experiences in Mexico and Peru. It was a milestone that exerted many influences. I can’t specify how much Anni could have contributed to Mariella’s work but there is a parallel between the two between geometry, fabrics, designs and so many other things. It was an exhibition as transcendent as the one Jean Dewasne did in 1954 at the Lima Gallery, with a radical geometric abstraction that marked many artists of the young generation of the time. Cartucho Miró Quesada published in his column “In black and white” that this painting “is the expression of what painting can and should be based on contemporary architecture… A respect for the surface, a monumentality of form, a pictorial equivalent of modern construction technology, a desire for simplicity and rigor, and a harmony of spirit.”

70 years later something similar could be said about Mariella Agois’ exhibition at MALI. Cured -symptomatically- by Paulo Dam, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture of the Catholic University, architect and notable researcher. His presence reinforces the architectural content of this work. He is accompanied by Jorge Villacorta and the artist herself. She is a woman of respectable knowledge and she knows perfectly what she can exhibit when the requirement of selecting 30 pieces from a very extensive production is imposed on her.

I do not fully perceive in this work the echo of Frank Stella or the playful intentions alluded to in the presentation. I admit that there may be a game in it but in any case it seems intense, obsessive, passionate as his life itself was. In the epidermis, I appreciate in these paintings an orientation closer to the investigations of optical art that could be the result of basing his work on vectors. As the curators point out, it takes the linear pattern known as a chevron: “two diagonals meet at an acute angle and coincide at a point, comparable to the head of an arrow. …Agois’s visual patterns may consist of parallel stripes that she dynamically organizes on a pictorial level…” See example: /

But these works are more complex than the virtual creation of planes, folds and depths. I have had the opportunity to see records of the best geometric installation that has been done in Peru – by her – and that should be public. Its expansive lines are essentially architectural and have the ability to break with the orthogonality of any space, dislocating any type of perspective, allowing the viewer to be cloistered in a room where everything looks ready to explode.

The contents of Mariella Agois’ painting exceed simple vector appreciation. For example, in the current exhibition at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid, important international works were presented in the exhibition Before America. Considered the best exhibition in Spain in 2023, it brings together pre-Columbian influences from the 20th century to the present. In the area dedicated to “Invention and Conceptualisms” one of his works, “Pliegue 47”, from the previous year, shone. She maintained “We use spaces like those offered by the pre-Columbian that are part of our identity… I was born in this territory that is geographical and cultural, at the same time. So they are my references…”

This anthology is very timely. Not because it coincides with an unforeseen death but because of the extraordinary importance of the artist. Over the years she experimented with new languages ​​and accumulated a wealth of unpublished documentation – to which I have had privileged access – which should be made public along with a major retrospective of her work. It is a pending task from MALI to one of our greatest artists.

Mariella Agois was dazzling in all aspects of her life. She will always be with me in this time that she has left me.

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