The Visual Library of Marta Ibarrondo
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Marta Ibarrondo's artistic practice represents a profound meditation on the relationship between literature, memory, and the pictorial. Her artistic voice interrogates the intersection of commercial imagery, sacred texts, and literary experience. Born in Bilbao and educated at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied Communications and French Literature, Ibarrondo's work bridges European and American cultural perspectives. Her career trajectory encompasses three decades in New York working in advertising, fine art, illustration, and film before relocating to Miami in 2020.

Central to understanding Ibarrondo's practice is her conceptualization of the Great Library of Alexandria as both symbol and specter, representing simultaneously the accumulation of human knowledge and its potential erasure. This project functions as both homage and intervention, constructing a parallel archive that resists the ephemerality of memory through material permanence. The genesis of her artistic vision can be traced to a formative encounter with Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de soledad at age thirteen, a moment that fundamentally altered her relationship with narrative and language. This early experience established literature not merely as text but as a transformative force capable of expanding consciousness and reshaping worldviews. The artist's subsequent fascination with libraries as "repositories of collective memory and silent witnesses to the evolution of human thought" inscribes her work within a broader discourse on knowledge preservation, cultural memory, and the fragility of intellectual heritage.

The resulting series of works draws upon her interpretation and critique of historical texts and their influence in contemporary society. The artist's belief that "books choose their readers" introduces an element of mysticism that complicates purely material or conceptual readings of her work. This notion of reciprocal selection between reader and text, and subsequently between artist and material, suggests a practice guided by intuition as much as intellect. Books return to Ibarrondo not for re-reading in the traditional sense but for transformation into visual form. The intersection of personal biography and universal themes creates productive tension throughout her oeuvre. While her projects emerge from individual encounters with texts, the resulting works speak to collective experiences of reading, memory, and cultural transmission. The "visual library" she constructs becomes a shared space where personal obsession transforms into cultural commentary.

The artist treats materials as vessels of collective remembrance, each object bearing the accumulated weight of its cultural passage through time. Her research process involves sourcing materials that possess what Walter Benjamin might term "aura," the unique presence of the original. In her series addressing Kerouac's On the Road, Ibarrondo demonstrates how geographical materials can amplify literary themes. The vintage maps from the mid-1940s to 1959 serve as temporal markers that anchor the painted expressions within specific historical moments. These maps, acquired through second-hand markets in New York and online searches over five years, add layers of journey and discovery that echo the novel's themes of movement and quest.

Her engagement with Orwell's Animal Farm demonstrates how material specificity can amplify political critique. By painting the novel's maxims on vintage French butcher paper from the 1940s, butcher knives, and meat recipe books, Ibarrondo creates a visceral connection between the text's themes of power, violence, and consumption. The choice of butcher materials transforms Orwell's allegorical animals into literal meat, making explicit the violence underlying political rhetoric. The temporal alignment between materials and text proves particularly striking, carrying echoes of rationing, scarcity, and the mechanization of death that haunted Orwell's generation. When Ibarrondo inscribes "ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS" across weathered blades and blood-stained paper, she collapses the metaphorical distance between political abstraction and physical brutality. The butcher's tools become charged with darker implications about who wields the knife and who becomes the carcass. Works like "NO ANIMAL SHALL KILL ANY OTHER ANIMAL WITHOUT CAUSE" painted on butcher knives create objects that function simultaneously as art, weapon, and warning. Each piece in the series operates as both historical artifact and contemporary mirror.

In her series The Bible, Ibarrondo turns her critical lens toward religious texts and their role in perpetuating gender inequality. Raised in the Catholic faith, she examines how biblical doctrine has historically legitimized the exclusion of women from ecclesiastical power structures. This series, which gained particular resonance when exhibited during the papal conclave at the Vatican, represents a significant expansion of her practice, moving beyond literary texts to engage with sacred scripture as another form of cultural narrative that shapes social hierarchies. The artist notes a crucial distinction: while vintage advertisements now appear "silly and outdated," reflecting advertising's evolution, "the sexist verses from the Bible remain unchanged, still claiming divine authority."

The typographic elements across Ibarrondo's oeuvre demand particular attention. Her painted words, whether rendering Kerouac's expressions of wanderlust, Orwell's political maxims, or biblical prescriptions, transform language from transparent communication into opaque presence. She describes creating "blocky, menacing, and crude typography meant to arrest attention and provoke thought." This treatment recalls both propaganda aesthetics and street art urgency, while the physicality of these painted words, built through layers that "conceal and reveal," suggests language as geological formation rather than ephemeral utterance. The artist's belief that "words carry weight not only in their meaning but in their physical presence" manifests throughout her practice. The accumulation of paint layers creates textual objects that resist easy consumption or dismissal, asserting the continued relevance of physical encounter in an increasingly virtual world.

The formal innovations in her practice participate in a broader tradition of assemblage while maintaining a distinctive focus on textual interpretation. Unlike purely conceptual approaches that might privilege idea over material, her work insists on sensuous encounter with objects as fundamental to meaning production. The progression from personal literary encounters to systematic critique of religious and commercial narratives demonstrates an artist increasingly confident in her role as visual translator and cultural critic. Her practice offers both a model for artistic engagement with textual authority and a meditation on the necessity of making visible the often-invisible operations of language in maintaining social structures. The synthesis of Ibarrondo's diverse influences creates a unique perspective for examining how texts function across cultures and contexts. Her work stands as an active intervention in the ongoing negotiation between tradition and critique, memory and reimagining, as well as word and image.

— Alberto Ríos de la Rosa.
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