Cortijada Los Gazquez - Vida en 1000m. Parque Natural Sierra Maria Los Velez. Andalucia.

She draws a fine line between abstraction and figuration, never transgressing the territory of one or the other. The drawings are in panels, the edges being the edge of the paper, a corner where the plane of one wall meets another. Itʼs a ʻdrop downʼ panorama, an unfolded landscape, an expanded, sometimes exploded, fragmented floribunda of life form.

When coloured with pencil crayon, bitter orange, pink and the Florentine painter Uccelloʼs red, I can see his Battle at San Romano. I see an element of his compositional devices, his playing with linear perspective. But Marksʼ work transcends the need to play with perspective. Marks plays with time, for this is like animation.

Works on paper are long, detail canʼt be read in one viewing. Like the Emperor of China surveying a cartographerʼs map of the Yellow River, itʼs length necessitates the viewer to move from left to right. We move from one scene to the next and within each movement we have a lapse in time, a change of scene.

Before we were warm, the movement aggressive, broad sweeps of colour crash through purple-crimson garnets casting explosive gravity defying splinters to the sky. Then next we are before frozen water, still reflection and the soft yellow light of dawn.

So Marks unfolds a story, a chain of events and like the work of Hayo Miyazaki there is no good or evil. Sympathies switch, there is no clear victory and the relationship between Volitia (the heroin of her work) and nature is cyclic. So here is another fine balance.

Suntrap manifests itʼs self within an open but enclosed space within the body of a greater edifice, Los Gázquez. Volitia resides here in our roofless inner courtyard, an Andalucían patio, a place of shelter, a place of security both from the outside world, from those who might want to come in, and for those within who might want to get out. And at once this containment offers the opportunity to imagine other existences. Four walls, four sides of a piece of paper, four sides of a frame, a selected perspective on other worlds.

The Brazilian artist Roberto Burle Marx created space within space. He used the living, organic world to create form and composition, colour, light and shade. His canvas was the garden he designed for the Olivo Gomes Residence in São Paulo, and the passage of time in his work was the maturing of the plants and trees he planted there. But here, at Los Gázquez, we have the ecology of the pencil and brush, a monochrome ecosystem of the artistʼs imagination. The passage of light through our atmosphere giving colour nuance and hue.

There is much to admire in the works of Melissa Marks. I sub-titled this piece of short writing ʻfrom the perspective of another artistʼ. Thatʼs me, the other artist, one who wishes his own creativity could take such a consistent and assured line as Marks. To have found oneʼs visual and conceptual language so early in oneʼs career and to be able to pursue this ʻthingʼ for so long, the chaser never to be exhausted by the chase, is a very rare and lucky entity to possess. Long may the works of the imagination endure and define us, long may they sustain us and remind us of our place within this solar system.