Brushes, canvas, fabrics, a lot of color and of course, roosters, are all that the Venezuelan artist Mari Ménez needs, a painter who today surprises the world with several works inspired by a common animal, the fighting rooster, which for her it signifies the connection with his father.
“My dad suffered from Alzheimer’s. He died last year, but in 2019, he was already almost 14 years old with this disease,” says Mary, who since she arrived in Colombia in 2010 has not stopped bringing her paintings to life. these copies with which she managed to make her father remember her through an image that was familiar to her.” He lived in Venezuela, I here in Colombia and because of his illness he no longer remembered me. We would make a phone call and he would just repeat what someone else told him he had to say because he didn’t know who he was talking to.”
“When I painted that rooster and my sister shows it to her in a tablets, he sees it and says: ‘this is a show rooster, it is not a fighting rooster, because it has a comb and a chin. It’s a Spanish rooster’”, recalls Ménez in an interview with the voice of america.
This arts graduate with Wayúu ancestors and Afro descent, explains that she lets herself be influenced by the French artist Henri Rousseau, whom she admires for the spontaneity in his paintings.
“The play that I tend to repeat the most is the one with the gentleman who is a Golden Gray rooster. He is a rooster that is already old. When I did the original work, I had made an old rooster; however, he retains that gallantry, but he is also that being who has already won all his battles and has his dignified retirement, ”explains the artist, about her works that are also found in clothing and accessories.
From Zipaquirá, Cundinamarca, Colombia, and far from Venezuela, Ménez exports his works to countries such as the United States, Panama, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic.
In his works, he makes it clear that he tries to show his own image and personality. “When I work, I have to feel good. I have a bad habit of painting in heels. If I don’t have makeup, I don’t have heels, I don’t have a nice dress, I’m not going to paint the roosters in the same way as if I did it with ripped jeans or tennis shoes”.
For the art curator, José Gregorio Noroño, Mary’s work reflects the constant relationship between life and art.
“We received her in a very curious way when we see that this artist produces a work, she conceives it based on her childhood, which was surrounded by poultry, her father was a cockerel”, he explains to the VOA Norono.
Although her idea of illustrating specimens of fine rooster was born from her childhood memories, today this Venezuelan has taken her works internationally, to stages such as Mexico and France that have sheltered Mary’s works, she is currently preparing an exhibition from Zipaquirá, the well-known City of Salt.
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