Mariana Horgan: Primeiro Gesto

What compels the first gesture? A trace on stone, a scratch in wood, a finger dragged through sand. Long before language, there was the mark—a need to express something, however wordless, through movement, repetition, resistance. The mark precedes meaning, yet contains it entirely. In Primeiro Gesto, Mariana Horgan returns to this primal urge, not to romanticise it, but to examine what it still means to make a mark today.

This exhibition marks a decisive moment in Horgan's practice. Known for her layered, mostly monochromatic abstractions, she has long approached painting as a negotiation between control and release. In previous works, this tension was contained—held back beneath carefully composed surfaces. Here, that containment is loosened. The process is left visible. Marks are allowed to remain. The paintings speak more directly, with a clarity and conviction that signal a shift in authorship.

Each work is built through a sequence of intuitive and analytical phases. Horgan begins with spontaneous mark-making—fast, instinctive, and unresolved. She then moves into a slower, more deliberate mode of editing: concealing, scraping, layering, and adjusting. The result is a surface shaped as much by erasure as by addition. Her compositions are not declarative; they are reflective. They document thought in progress, offering a record of visual reasoning unfolding in time.

Despite their abstraction, the works are rooted in the body. The gestures suggest writing, mapping, scarring, or movement. Materials include acrylics, powdered pigment, and raw linen, sometimes left unstretched. This structural openness is intentional—it foregrounds fragility, and reinforces the idea of painting as a live, physical site of encounter.

At the centre of the exhibition is a participatory installation: a blank canvas placed beside a set of tools, intentionally left untouched by the artist. Visitors are invited to contribute their own marks. Over time, Horgan will return to the canvas—not to complete it, but to respond. This ongoing dialogue introduces a conceptual shift: the work is no longer a fixed object, but a living process shaped through exchange, contingency, and shared presence.

The installation recalls seminal performance-based works that redefined the role of the audience—most notably Marina Abramović's Rhythm 0 (1974), in which the public was given free rein to act upon the artist's body using objects ranging from benign to violent. Though Horgan's approach is more restrained, it similarly transfers agency to the viewer, revealing the psychological and ethical dimensions of participation. As with Tracey Emin's My Bed, which transformed private space into public encounter, Primeiro Gesto dissolves conventional boundaries. The gallery becomes at once studio, performance site, and evolving archive. Meaning emerges not as fixed certainty, but through relational exchange—gesture, proximity, and time.

This exhibition is not concerned with beginnings in a linear sense. It is about returning—to the act of making, to vulnerability, to the gesture as a primary structure of thought. Horgan does not abandon her previous vocabulary; she refines and extends it. What changes is what she is willing to leave exposed.

The final structure of the exhibition mirrors this ethos. As in her paintings, where the first mark often becomes the last, the finissage becomes the true vernissage: the moment when the work—layered, communal, and complete in its incompleteness—reveals its final state.