I’m not here to tell you how to perceive Marc Aran Reyes’ Being-Non-Being, that delight and delirium is for your own eyes and conscious mind. Nor am I here to sway you to be moved a certain way, that bittersweet sensation is for however you’re currently being or not being.

However in an attempt to marry my perspective of his work and his own process and thoughts on what he calls phases of non-being; where each phase transcends from the softness of shared movement down through the hard edges of patterns which appear like familiarly restless structures until they naturally break to disintegrate into neither real or unreal forms as each part reintegrates to create something so alien that they almost feel strangely like a home we’ve never been, all that remains for me to say is, in the most beautifully bizarre way, I feel seen.

Now, whether that brings you comfortable or uncomfortable is probably relative to your phase within being/non-being. In our case, it’s ever undulating.

As far as my grasp on semantics go, for what seems to him like manifestations of phases that inevitably mirror our inner conflict with our collective and individual perception of the modernisation of our external realities and back, to me feels like going through the stages of being through cycles of necessary non-being.

And as Sartre once wrote, we are never fully complete, and though objects, so are the pieces in this exhibit as they continue to be what they can or cannot be with and without us and/or you.

To Marc Aran Reyes, the act of painting is simply another way his confrontation of his own human finitude takes its humble form. His manifestations of imagined spaces and formless entities are mere by-products of our very human inability to perceive the impossible while in the same breath, our futile yet continuous attempt to capture glimpses of them in the absurd. If only to make sense of what we cannot see in the void.

It will always reach a point where acting on it is no longer for the creation of representations of the non-being. We act on it because it’s inevitable not to do so.

And honestly, could anything else be more human?

Written by AB Coronel