COLLAPSE (subtitled), 2025
In COLLAPSE (subtitled), the paintings are not scenes of disaster, but prophecies of the end of time. They do not appear as protagonists, but as subtitles that guide, narrate, functioning as a teleprompter of catastrophe. Oil paint acts as an anti-chronological material: it drags slowly, thickens, resists the vertigo of the fleeting subtitle racing across the screen. Painting insists: against the immediacy of the feed, time can still coagulate in layers.
In this setting, the deus ex machina emerges—the theatrical device that once promised an exit, a mechanical salvation. In the darkness, signs of redemption appear and disappear like flashes, like canned applause. A televisual cue for survival, yet always absurd, failed, insufficient.
The monitor dictates the narration. Catastrophe is subtitled, broadcast, forgotten as just another episode in the endless series of life. What matters is not what happens, but how it is framed, how it is projected. The apocalypse is watched, scrolled through, forgotten, only to begin again. The farewell —good night, goodbye— functions as epitaph: a minimal, banal, and at the same time human gesture. An ironic lightness in the face of imminent collapse.
In this exhibition, Martín Estrada Márquez crosses matter and speed, destruction and salvation, the factual and the transmitted. It is not the announcement of the end, but the reminder that we are already inside it.
—Cristina Sandoval
Oil on canvas, steel frame
Subtitled is a series of process-based oil paintings that play with the temporal qualities of the material, the media dimension of text filtered through the subtitle format found across various audiovisual media, and the montage inherent in the construction of television or film sets. These paintings narrate —in a kind of open-ended finale for a film— different dates on which the end of the world has been predicted, whether through scientific/ pseudoscientific claims or by religious, paranormal, or natural causes.
Possible Farewells for Possible Endings frames a tangible fiction: who will have the power to broadcast the last words before collapse, and what weight would they carry? To partially answer this question, I insert into the video references from TV shows and Hollywood films in which the apocalypse is being broadcasted live, taking the last words spoken by people on screen. I like to imagine this monitor placed in a context where humanity no longer exists, yet the message on the screen continues to run until the material conditions sustaining it cease to exist.
Lightbox.
Apparition (DEUS EX MACHINA) functions as a kind of applause sign or “on air” indicator that, by switching on and off sporadically, reveals the only solution to the end: a miracle. A deus ex machina is a narrative device from Greek theater meaning “God from the machine,” used to miraculously resolve a dramatic impasse. This device has been exhausted across various media, especially in cinematic and television fictions; it would seem, then, that this is the only solution to downfall.