EMOTIONAL SAVANT
a dirty horizon.a blooming rose.a burning building.palms tipped to the sky.

this is just one of the many worlds created by artist mario patino, whose digital works hint at the emotional evolution enabled by internet technologies. while the borders between global cultures have in many ways been torn down by widespread internet communication, those on the net relate in highly charged psychological spaces. while emotions can hint at the gestures, movements and voices of internet communicators, there is often a certain artifice to their use. understandable, seeing that their existence gives internet communication away. emotions reveal that words alone are often not enough. the information revolution provides us with a strange new world, a binary code viewed through shimmering, non linear surfaces.

In patino's work, a sense of frustrated communication & passionate introvertion is palpably expressed. a certain cool, remoteness clings to his socially atomised figures. their hands rise to the air evocating possibility and loss. patino's figures stand at the crossroads of time. eyes cocked towards a passionate past, ears tuned to the approaching rumble of an uncertain future; looking into the background of patino's works you'll see that the slate is bare.

Hinted in gesture and reflected in landscape, mario patino's digital figures stand on the brink of a surreal new world: a promise, a remembrance, an emotional signpost.

Like an other with no name, woman and violence in the work of Mario Patiño

Mario Patiño perverts the woman-virgin paradigm and transforms it into the whore-saint one, present hybrid in the masculine erotic fantasy. In many of the sexual scenes depicted by the artist, this whore-saint assumes a position of power on the masculine figure, in which revenge seems one to which the man surrenders himself, already undressed of the moral force that culture grants him, and the physical force that nature gives him. That is the symbolic way in which Patiño undermines the macho order that reigns in Mexican society, by working the feminine like a monumental and vindictive icon.

In the formal , the work Mario Patiño does with the space in his figurative panels, is derived from his experience with abstract painting. In some way the space is the element where Mario transfers his perception of reality like an abstraction in a process that remembers the first cubist attempts. In that sense the use of multiple perspective, is as important as the use of color and light, creating different visual planes for a same object or a same scene. With that interest in mind, it is logical that Mario has also worked the assemblage and the soft sculpture, as well as the incorporation of objects to its panels, always in a line that relates the feminine subject with violence, squalor and disease. This evidences Patiño´s tendency to work not only with false spaces in the pictorial support, but also with real spaces, constructing facilities that are like staged scenes, aggressive in their baroque style and subversive in their kitsch essence .

Kitsch is fundamental for Mario, given his ambition to reproduce and to criticize the attitude of the traditional male and the world of conventions that surround women in México. Also, it is an element derived from his searches in the field of popular painting, crafts and public spaces.

With such characteristics, the work of Mario Patiño unfolds as an irreverent mixture of cultural references: the painting and the object, the abstraction and the figurative, the traditional and the contemporary, the sacred and the profane, the political and the decorative, creating a media that the painter himself has described like a perverse and painful fusion of contemporaneity.